Vehicle Positioning with Geospatial Indexing

Navigation is one of the basic components of any transportation task. Based on vehicle type there are different requirements for on-board positioning system. Common positioning requires that all the data have been represented in the cartesian reference frame. Global geospatial indexing systems are very popular today in different geodata visualization applications. Geospatial indexing system partitions the Earth’s surface into a set of elementary cells with unified addressing at different resolution levels. In the paper, we consider application of global geospatial indexing for vehicle positioning by time of arrival method. Hierarchical hexagonal spatial indexing system is used to identify cell index of vehicle position by measuring k-ring parameters to particular navigational aids. Indexes of navigational aids are given in the system. Identification of vehicle position is based on a logical operation of intersection in sets of hexagonal location lines. Proposed approach is computationally effective due to using logical operation instead of classical coordinates transformation and application of some numerical methods to solve navigation equations. Proposed positioning approach has been verified with airplane positioning based on a pair of navigational aids.