A Predictive Digital Twin for Integrity Monitoring of Multi-Source Positioning Navigation & Timing (PNT) Systems

Although GNSS is able to provide reliable PNT services for most of our daily applications, they are vulnerable to unintentional interference, intentional jamming, and malicious spoofing, especially for DoD-related applications. On the battlefield, PNT utilizing any single GNSS service becomes unreliable. To overcome this shortcoming, a family of more robust methods was proposed to enhance the reliability of PNT services by exploiting multiple sources for navigation. With this idea, one approach was proposed that utilizes signals of opportunity (SOPs) from multiple sources, including other GNSS constellations, LEO satellites, AM/FM radio broadcast, and cellular base stations. By fusing the PNT information extracted from multiple sources, the error/uncertainty can be significantly reduced, and the reliability can be improved. For this project, we propose an advanced digital twin (DT) for integrity monitoring of multi-source PNT (MS-PNT) systems, named DT-MS-PNT, to provide a realistic software testbed to support the testing and validation of integrity monitoring methods for MS-PNT systems. Our proposed DT-MS-PNT system consists of six main components, and the entire DT will be implemented as a web service deployed on a server or high-performance computer (HPC). The users can access this tool via its graphical user interface (GUI) using any web browser from any device that has internet connection. Through the GUI, users will be able to provide configuration regarding the simulation scenario, observe the simulation progress, and control the simulation process. The status of the digital twin and the processing results are presented to the users through the GUI in real-time. Our DT will be implemented as an open architecture toolchain. A set of simulation software products will be integrated to provide a systematic simulation framework. By default, we will provide a set of basic functionalities that cover a sufficient range of use case scenarios. Users are also able to implement new simulation modules following the interface standards defined by our DT-MS-PNT framework to extend the capability of the DT.