ION Technical Content
Towards High Integrity Positioning
| Abstract: | Integrity is one of the most crucial performance parameters when a positioning system is to be used for safety critical operations, such as in aviation applications. However, currently known positioning algorithms are optimised for accuracy instead. Even when they are combined with fault detection and exclusion schemes, these algorithms still give sub-optimal integrity. This paper promotes a new way of thinking: to design integrity into positioning and error detecting methods – arriving at so-called high integrity positioning algorithms-rather than design for accuracy and evaluate integrity performance afterwards. It first shows why algorithms should be designed for optimal integrity rather than accuracy. Then, the paper explains how integrity can be obtained by either error accommodation, or fault detection and exclusion. Using the insights obtained, it is shown why current algorithms are not optimal and where a remedy could be found. The new class of high integrity positioning algorithms that is thus described aims at obtaining improved integrity with both current and new systems; not by improving the physical infrastructure, but by using clever algorithmic optimisation in the receiver. A small simulation example shows that the integrity and availability of unaugmented GPS for non-precision approach can indeed be improved substantially. Along the way, the same philosophy is shown to be not only exploitable for position estimation but for other parameter estimates in an integrated navigation as well, making the approach equally valuable for computing, for example, differential corrections for WAAS or LAAS. |
| Published in: |
Proceedings of the 12th International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GPS 1999) September 14 - 17, 1999 Nashville, TN |
| Pages: | 2113 - 2120 |
| Cite this article: | Ober, P.B., "Towards High Integrity Positioning," Proceedings of the 12th International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GPS 1999), Nashville, TN, September 1999, pp. 2113-2120. |
| Full Paper: |
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