There now is coming a new age for radio-navigation where there is a radical change in the type of users and types of uses of the information, such as autonomous control or which give control guidance for a number of processes of a safety critical nature including vehicle velocity. For some of these new uses, rather than deciding whether or not to use the information to assist in their decision making processes, users will have to decide when to stop autonomous control, so to make decisions based on other information, such as sight and sound. The new users will utilise the information in a number of business and leisure land-based applications. These are as diverse as driving vehicles to navigating whilst walking and cycling. The number of users will explode from a few hundreds of thousand to many tens or hundreds of millions.

It is clearly important to identify the technology and accuracy requirements of the user for their navigation and positioning needs. This is essential to arriving at a state of the art and to assist the processes now in place for determining a European Radio-navigation Plan.

The information being gathered will assist in determining non safety critical applications that can rely on one source of radio-navigation service as well as those of a safety critical nature or having serious financial consequence therefore requiring a secondary service and/or increased integrity. It will also identify applications that require enhanced services that cannot be catered for by normal terrestrial or satellite services and may require high precision or indoor localisation within a restricted locality and therefore require complementary (interoperable) services originating from for example blue-tooth or psuedolites technology.

If radio based location systems and services become easily affordable and accurate, there will be many more applications than have so far been identified.

In some applications position information alone may not be enough and direction or velocity information may also be required. In other applications the position information is only of use when used in conjunction with a topology engine that tracks the user within an envelope that might be an "allowable" area or route. Where additional information is required, this must be taken into consideration for suitable technological solutions.

The current draft paper is seeking input from all sources to assist in the process of determining current and future needs.

Recommended Actions (draft)

These are stil being developed but currently include:

1. There is need to provide for a forum within or reporting to the ERNP (European Radio-navigation plan) with all mobility groups to define baseline standards for software, timing, vertical and horizontal accuracy, telemetric and interoperability issues
2. Action is required to establish the viability of LORAN and EUROFIX for all transport and mobility communities.