The U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) is looking for industry insight on how to best complement and support its Positioning, Navigation, and Timing (PNT) functions with new technology that does not depend on traditional Global Positioning System (GPS) tech.
In a request for information (RFI) issued by the Transportation Department’s John A. Volpe National Transportation Systems Center, the agency said it is seeking input in connection with an effort to conduct “market research to identify interested and capable Complementary PNT (CPNT) vendors who may be interested and open to participating in U.S. DOT’s field test trials.”
Responses to the RFI are due Oct. 10.
“Taken together with efforts of other Federal partners, these initiatives will strengthen [the] resilience of the Nation’s PNT-dependent systems through the U.S. Government’s purchasing power as a demanding customer of Complementary PNT (CPNT) services, along with critical infrastructure owners and operators, resulting in safer, more secure critical infrastructure for the nation,” DoT said.
The testing will include small-scale deployment of technical readiness levels, and a “test range to characterize the capabilities and limitations of such technologies to provide PNT information that meet critical infrastructure needs when GPS service is not available and/or degraded due environmental, unintentional, and/or intentional disruptions,” stated the department.
DoT said it wants to “test these technologies against critical infrastructure (CI) relevant requirements in order to gain confidence in performance and foster user adoption.”
The Transportation Department explained the need to move away from GPS technology due to “GPS [relying] on signals broadcast from satellites in medium Earth orbit (MEO), signal strength at the receiver is low and thus vulnerable to intentional and unintentional disruptions,”
The tests also come as a result of a 2020 executive order looking to strengthen government capabilities in (PNT) services.
DoT held demonstrations of GPS alternatives in 2020, but those tests did not look at cybersecurity vulnerabilities such as jamming and spoofing of signals.
