Galileo, the European global navigation satellite system, shall enable a global high-precision determination of the user’s position. From a technical point of view Galileo is similar to the United States GPS system and to the Russian GLONASS system. Currently, Galileo is operated by Spaceopal in Munich. Spaceopal is a joint venture by DLR Gesellschaft für Raumfahrtanwendungen (GfR) and the Italian company Telespazio.
Beside a high accuracy of the positioning, a high fault tolerance of Galileo is a primary target. This robustness requires a permanent monitoring of the satellite system to solve problems within a short period of time. The departments for High-Performance Computing and for Intelligent and Distributed Systems were both involved in developing a software to allow this. This was joined work with the aforementioned companies and the DLR institute of Communications and Navigation.
As a result, we have developed a software that is used for monthly reports of Galileo’s free open services. The report summarizes the measurements of the global Galileo Sensor Stations network. Two examples for measured performance indicators are the signal strength of each satellite and the accuracy of their internal atomic clocks. The software was developed with the following demands:
robustness - the algorithms have to cope with gaps in the measured data
performance - a large dataset is collected each month. The software must be able to compute the results within 1-2 days.
extensibility - the software shall be used for several years. Since extensions might be necessary in the future a component-based software was developed. Furthermore, each component is tested automatically.
Weiterführende Links