SEA GATE is a test environment in the port of Rostock (Germany) for development and testing of maritime Galileo applications. Several terrestrial Galileo transmitters will be placed around the port of Rostock which broadcast a Galileo-like signal. A mobile user operating in the broadcast area is able to calculate its position by using these signals. SEA GATE is currently under construction and will be operational by beginning of 2008. The operations phase will be open for application development and testing to interested parties. The area of the port of Rostock presents much different cases for a lot of customer scenarios. One of them is the necessity of high-precision navigation in critical zones like near the coast, ship passages or small harbor basins, another is the improvement of multi-modal transport in the port area. Critical zones in harbor areas are narrow ship passages with high volume traffic. In the port of Rostock there are three of them: The sea channel between the harbor and the Baltic Sea, the turn-around area for ships and the docking stations for ferries. The accuracy for docking maneuvers should be better than 0.2 m for an automatic solution in the future. For the time being GPS offers only an accuracy of ~4 m. SEA GATE aims at reaching an accuracy of 0.5m. In addition, attitude determination for ships with SEA GATE is another goal. The performance of SEA GATE will be shown in a reference application on-board the Scandlines ferry "Mecklenburg-Vorpommern". Basically SEA GATE will provide a continuous and complete test environment for maritime Galileo applications for hardware and software by combining land- and shipside information together with position information. Among the reference application it is envisaged that software applications and technical solutions in the fields of multimodal transport logistics, ship and manpower security (safety of life) will be developed based on SEA GATE. The paper will give an overview of the SEA GATE system. System critical aspects will be discussed. First results of the system development and installations will be presented as well as performance results from initial tests.
展开▼
