GMV improves the navigation performance of over 4,000 airports

The European Organisation for the Safety of Air Navigation, EUROCONTROL, has awarded to the multinational technology company GMV a contract for the evolution of AUGUR, a free service for pilots, airspace users, and air navigation service providers. 

AUGUR is a web-based service that makes it possible to predict the availability of the GPS+RAIM (Receiver Autonomous Integrity Monitoring) navigation solution for a wide range of air operations The RAIM processing algorithm, standardized and incorporated into most aeronautical GPS receivers, makes it possible to check the integrity of GPS satellite signals by exploiting the redundancy of measurements offered by the current constellation. Although only four satellites in view are needed to calculate the position and time of the aircraft, the current GPS constellation has 31 active satellites, meaning that the receivers are getting signals from more than four satellites most of the time. The RAIM technique takes advantage of these additional measurements to check the integrity of the satellites, thus making sure that the position obtained is correct within the alarm limits established for each operation.

Within the framework of the new project, GMV will lead all phases related to the development of the new AUGUR services, including definition of requirements, design, implementation, verification, validation, and software deployment. Throughout the process of designing, developing, and validating the new version, which will be available in May 2025, GMV will also continue to provide the current services, ensuring they are not interrupted.

In addition to improving service performance, this evolution of AUGUR will provide better graphic capabilities and allow for greater integration with external tools and services. End users will see immediate benefits, since the improvement of graphic capabilities is closely tied to simplified decision-making and event investigation, shortening response time in operational tasks. 

About the AUGUR service

GMV is the current supplier of AUGUR, a service based on GMV’s GNASSURE product, a solution for predicting GNSS service performance for use in aviation navigation and surveillance applications.

Since 1998, EUROCONTROL has been providing this service free of charge to pilots, airspace users, and air navigation service providers. Thanks to AUGUR, they can predict unavailability of the GPS/RAIM function in the next three days at any airport located in the member states of the ECAC and MEDA regions. These regions cover 44 countries in Europe and 12 countries in North Africa and the Middle East, respectively. Together, they represent more than 4,000 airports all over the world, including overseas territories of several European countries.

In addition to RAIM prediction, AUGUR provides the following additional services to users: 

• NOTAM (Notice to Air Men) service: publication of NOTAM proposals relevant for predicting RAIM function unavailability. Through the European AIS Database (EAD), these notices are delivered to the NOTAM offices (NOF) at airports with the service. 

• Application Programming Interface (API) service: tool for requesting related commercial data, such as current GPS status, available locations, and planned outages. This allows users to develop their own tools and integrate them with AUGUR.

• Technical support: centralized support system to help users with questions, technical problems, or service subscriptions. 

Improvements made 

• Display of RAIM GPS availability on a map

• Integration of the planned Navigation Integrity Category (NIC), which measures the quality of the aircraft navigation position transmitted via Automatic Dependent Surveillance–Broadcast (ADS-B).   

• Issuing of space weather warnings such as solar flares, geomagnetic storms and coronal mass ejections (CME).

• Options to import/export geographic data in industry standard formats.