The LIASON Project – Bringing Combined Positioning and Communications Technologies to Market

LIAISON is a 3.5 years initiative with 30 partners from 10 European countries to develop and implement a new generation of location-based services (LBS) for the professional market. The project approach, based on what is called ‘enhanced assisted GPS’, is designed to improve the speed, accuracy and reliability of existing GPS systems, allowing a whole new range of time, cost and life-saving services to be developed. The key difference between the enhanced assisted GPS being implemented by LIAISON and standard GPS is a ‘”substantial” improvement in every aspect of the location-based services, the coordinator notes. By combining GPS with an external server to refine the raw location data, LIAISON can pinpoint a person’s location to within one or two meters. Even more importantly, a user can pick up the signal and identify their location within seconds, not minutes, and the system works even in the most challenging environments, such as in urban canyons surrounded by high buildings or in dense forests.

The first tests involve deploying location-based services to aid remote workers for French broadcast service provider TDF, and also to enhance data collection for Ama, a waste management company in Rome. The second set of trials, which are scheduled to begin May 2007, entail assisting maintenance workers for Spanish electricity supplier Endesa, and operating an automated dispatch system for taxi drivers in Greece. In the third test phase, beginning January 2008, LBS will be implemented for the Sussex police force in the United Kingdom and for fire fighters in Italy.

A workshop has been held in September 2006 (proceedings).

Relation to my thesis: A big european project to improve speed, accuracy and reliability of LBS. The efforts are concentrated on professional applications rather than the public. I particularly like the Rome test on enhancing data collection of a waste management company. Even if the use of location information are different in each test, the core components of the system remain the same. It does not seem that the projects aims at covering my research question: “how certain (accurate) do positional and tracking systems have to be in order to be useful and acceptable?”.

I hope the outcome of the project will surpass the current louzy italian-based project web site.