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Project establishes innovative test framework to help UK operators, providers and suppliers adopt best practice and benchmark success
Spirent Communications, now part of Keysight Technologies, has partnered with the European Space Agency (ESA) to lead an initiative aimed at increasing the resilience of positioning, navigation and timing (PNT) systems used in critical national infrastructure. Under the initiative, Spirent and partners will deliver a comprehensive test framework to drive measurable resilience in PNT systems for users, operators and providers of critical infrastructure in the United Kingdom.
Supported by Element 2 of ESA’s Navigation Innovation and Support Program (NAVISP), the initiative is designed to raise awareness and improve resilient PNT test and assessment by providing a pathway to assess, validate and rate PNT equipment and services used in critical national infrastructure. The 2023 UK government report The Economic Impact on the UK of a Disruption to GNSS estimates a seven-day GNSS outage could cost the UK economy £7.6 billion. Critical infrastructure is heavily dependent on satellite-based PNT systems and data.
“For years, organizations have been wrestling with a fundamental challenge: they know PNT resilience matters, but they do not have a clear way to measure it or benchmark their progress,” explained Mark Holbrow, vice president of Engineering and Product Development at Spirent Positioning. “This new initiative changes that by building the tools and frameworks that let critical national infrastructure operators quantify resilience, track it, and improve it over time, and we’re proud that ESA has entrusted Spirent to lead this exciting three-year project.”
The Resiliency in Critical National Infrastructure will support the UK government’s resilient PNT strategy by enabling access to rigorous, quantitative test evidence and operational insights that help evaluate and validate PNT systems across essential sectors. It will comprise three core components:
Spirent PNT Alliance brings together companies, academic research partners, and PNT professional and government bodies to identify, develop and cater resilience services for critical infrastructure. It will include the Royal Institute of Navigation and other strategic partners to complement their activities and help build a resilient PNT ecosystem in the UK by commercializing best practices and connecting infrastructure operators with new technologies and test approaches.
PNT Shopfront showcases solutions that aid the adoption of resilient PNT and help to assure regulatory compliance for critical PNT dependencies.
PNT Resiliency Health Check will enable independent appraisal of GNSS equipment capability against general performance, resilience and security criteria. Annual health check assessments will help organizations understand their dependencies, identify vulnerabilities, and track improvements over time, with a technical framework that scores resilience against standard benchmarks to create a pathway toward industry-wide test methodologies.
“Intentional and malicious disruptions to GNSS are now a daily occurrence, and are pervasive in the aviation and maritime sector,” said Ramsey Faragher, director of the institute. “The Royal Institute of Navigation is focused on raising awareness to these issues and in promoting the needs for improved resilience against such disruptions, especially within Critical National Infrastructure. Our Best Practice Guidelines emphasize the criticality of thorough testing in order to verify resilience and to help protect against both existing and future attack vectors. The UK is well placed to take a lead in this area, and well placed to inspire other nations to follow suit. We are really pleased to see initiatives like these from our corporate partners, and we look forward to supporting them.”