Navigation aids network performance estimation with geospatial data analysis

Networks of navigation aids are widely used in civil aviation to measure navigation parameters. Networks of Distance measuring equipment (DME) and VHF omnidirectional range (VOR) provide services performance of each depending on the geographic location of the airplane. The network provides specific values of the number of available navigation aids, the number of pairs available for positioning, and the accuracy of positioning for each point of airspace. In the paper, we study the application of a global geospatial indexing system to use in geospatial data analysis of navigation aid performance. The geospatial indexing system provides partitioning of ellipsoidal shape into a grid with a particular cell shape. Also, the geospatial indexing system specifies the global addressing of each cell, which supports a hierarchical structure. We study the application of hierarchical hexagonal Spatial Index (regular hexagonal cell shape) and open location codes (rectangular cell shape) in the task of navigation aids network performance evaluation. The navigation aids network of Poland has been used for numerical demonstration of the proposed algorithm of geospatial data analysis. The performance of the navigation aid network is estimated based on the accuracy of positioning by pairs of DME/DME, VOR/DME, and VOR/VOR.