Antonio Defina

An innovative augmentation middleware for professional applications

The present paper describes an innovative system providing augmentation services following the cloud computing paradigm. Thanks to its flexibility it enables a large number of users to access to enhanced WADGPS functionalities in the navigation domain. Such platform, called augmentation module, relying on EGNOS and EDAS, has been originally conceived to make available integrity services to existent systems through an easy integration that avoid complete redesign of existing services. Such system for the remote Protection Levels computation has been successfully adapted and exploited in two projects funded by European Commission (GOLDEN-ICE and SAFE-PORT). Example of tests and results achieved by means of Augmentation Module will be reported at the end of the paper.

AURORA: an Energy Efficient Public Lighting IoT System for Smart Cities

Public lighting accounts for a considerable amount of the total electricity consumption. Solutions to reduce its energy (and cost) footprint do exists, and they often translate into costly lamp replacement projects, which cannot be afforded by the majority of municipalities. To solve this situation, we propose Aurora: a low-budget, easy-to-deploy IoT control system that exploits the ubiquity of cellular networks (2- 4G) and scalable Cloud computing architectures to allow Smart Cities to save on the public lighting electrical bill. We deploy Aurora in a mid-size Italian municipality and we evaluate its performance over 4 months to quantify both the power and the economic saving achieved by our solution. We estimate the impact of a city-level Aurora installation and further extend the benefit analysis to most populated EU countries.

The SafePort project: Concepts and results of trials

The paper presents the SafePort project. The aim of the project is the realization of a system close to the market able to provide a safe and efficient control of the transit of all vessels in a port from the port entrance to their berths and out again using the European Geostationary Navigation Overlay Service (EGNOS) Safety of Life (SoL) information. After the description of the basic concepts the system wants to leverage on, an overview of all the modules is provided. The paper is focused on the implementation and tests of the Portable Pilot Unit called SafePilot which exploits EGNOS SoL feature in order to provide to the whole system a reliable information about vessel positioning. Test results for the validation of the SafePilot concept are shown.

A GPS/EGNOS Local Element Integrated with the VHF Communication Infrastructure Under Development in the POP-ART Project

The paper aims at introducing the on-going activities around the design and development of a network-based positioning system exploiting the advantages of both the European Geostationary Navigation Overlay System (EGNOS) and the VHF communication infrastructure with the goal to support the Alpine Rescue Teams in the management of search and rescue operations. Such an innovative integration strategy among analog communication channels and EGNOS is the key topic of a project named Precise Operation Positioning for Alpine Rescue Teams (POP-ART) co-funded by the Galileo Joint Undertaking as specific action toward the support of innovative ideas around EGNOS and Galileo proposed by Small Medium Enterprises (SME). The positioning system is based on the raw GPS measurements collected by the users and transmitted to a Local Element by VHF radio channels (or GPRS when available). The POP-ART activities are based on pre-existing works already presented in [1] [3].