Nautical and aeronautical electronic charting/navigation systems /sub e/velopments, similarities and differences

Abstract

Although already considered more than fifty years ago, the use of electronic displays to replace paper maps in the cockpit of commercial aircraft has commenced only recently, whereas displays that depict the planned route relative to ownship are already in use for over twenty years. In contrast, in the nautical community, the use of an electronic navigation chart to replace the paper chart is already a fact for several years, while the depiction of the planned route was added later. Given the differences between the nautical and the aeronautical domain, it is logical that on the surface many differences are apparent between the implementations of electronic map displays. However, a closer examination reveals that many design questions are the same. Also, current developments with respect to the further increase in data integration show similarities. Besides the emulation of the conventional paper chart, the availability of the data used to generate electronic charts will allow for new functions that support the operator with the navigation task. One example for the nautical environment is a tighter integration between the navigation task and the guidance and control task. At present, a research project at the Royal Netherlands Naval College is exploring the potential of some navigation data presentation concepts that were originally developed for aerospace navigation. When assessing the potential of a certain concept, one should always consider that every existing implementation is a trade-off which resulted from the technical limitations of the time it was designed. Therefore, it is important to understand why a certain design was selected and why others were rejected. To better understand how operational requirements and technical possibilities resulted in the current generation of electronic charting and navigation displays, the first part of this paper provides an overview of the developments in the area of electronic navigation, charting, and guidance displays. Important similarities and differences between the nautical and the aeronautical domain are identified and the underlying rationale will be discussed. For a tighter integration of the navigation task with the guidance and control task, the integration of routing data is needed. The generation of the route should take the information on the constraints which is available from the data used to depict the electronic chart into account. The last part of the paper will address new developments in the area of navigation, guidance and control displays and the integration with dynamic routing.