Hi, everyone. I would like to begin by acknowledging the traditional custodian of the land on which we are tuning in today. For me, I'm on the land of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation. My name is Soo Lin Choi. This presentation will provide an overview of the Australia-Japan Quasi-Zeneca

Light System, or QCSS, Emergency Warning Service Trail Project, which took place this year in 2020 in Australia. I would like to acknowledge my co-authors on this paper, who are listed on this page.

There are five parts to my presentation. I will begin by providing an overview of the trial project, including previous work and the project objective, followed by a description of the technology behind the Japanese Quasi-Zeneca satellite system, or QCSS, Emergency Warning Service.

Then, I'll do a quick rundown on the methodology adopted by the project team, including a summary of the finding and lesson learned, and I will conclude with a few note points on opportunities and recommendation for next step.

As the title suggests, this project is a joint collaboration set up this year in 2020 between the Australian and Japanese governments. The aim of the project is to test the use of the Japanese navigation satellite

system, or QCSS, and its emergency warning service for disaster management and alerting in Australia. This slide shows the project consortium led by Japan Cabinet Office, Geoscience Australia, and Austrade.

The National Space Policy Secretariat of Japan Cabinet Office provided Australia with access to the QCSS satellite signal for testing, and SoftBank provided the GNSS receiver for use in the project. Frontier SI, the University of New South Wales, and RMIT University provided the research and technical support during the trial.

Emergency Management Australia, together with New South Wales Spatial Services Group, the State Emergency Services and Rural Fire Authority were engaged as stakeholders and offered their support for the field tests.

The QCSS EWS service provision concept is a satellite-based emergency warning service. On the left, a disaster or emergency is observed, monitored, and information collected by a relevant emergency agency.

The control centre identifies the appropriate information, including details and location of the disaster. A warning message is prepared by the control centre for transmission through a satellite broadcast, in this case using the

Japanese QCSS emergency warning system or service for satellite broadcasts to users on ground who are in the affected area. QCSS, or Quasi-Zenith Satellite System, is the Japanese version of GPS navigation satellite technology.

At present, QCSS is a four-satellite constellation with plans for expansion to seven satellites. Besides positioning, navigation, and timing capability to complement GPS, QCSS also offers augmentation services to improve

the positioning accuracy of GPS, as well as an emergency messaging service for disaster alerting and management. The service coverage of QCSS includes the Asia and Pacific region, as shown in the

figure on the right-hand side, with the satellite ground track of a figure 8. There are currently ongoing investigations on the extension of the QCSS emergency warning service and augmentation services outside of Japan into the Asia-Pacific region.

Prior to this project, the first investigative study on the use of QCSS EWS in Australia was conducted in 2014-2015.

The aim of the initial study was to evaluate the potential utilisation of the technology in Australia, in which the project team identified bushfire and flood alerting as potential utilisation cases.

Subsequently, in 2018, Australia participated in the European Galileo-based reliable automatic and low-latency emergency project called GARREL Warning Service Project. A series of field tests were conducted with the QCSS system in Victoria,

in which the project team confirmed reception of the emergency warning service signal. In early 2020, following the disastrous 2019 and 2020 Australian bushfire season, the National Space Policy Secretariat of Japan Cabinet Office set up a joint project with the Australian Government through Geoscience Australia to

undertake a feasibility test and capacity building project on the use of GNS's EWS technology in Australia. It is to note that Japan and the European Union are collaborating towards a common message format for their emergency warning

services, in which the definition of the common message format will be published through the Navigation System Interface Control Document or ICD. The EWS signal by QCSS will be broadcasted on the L1S signal using message type 44, while the

European Galileo system will broadcast the alert messages on their E1B and E5B signal using the INEV navigation message.

It is also worth mentioning that the EWS message format is aligned to the Common Alert Protocol, whereby the emergency warning service provider worldwide can encode their alert messages and send to QCSS and or Galileo satellite for broadcasting.

Ultimately, standardisation and common message definition will enable and enhance service adoption at the end user level irrespective of the satellite, whether it's QCSS or Galileo or both.

The QCSS emergency warning message contains standardised information of 21 items, as shown on this slide. In the trial project this year, two emergency messages were being trolled, namely for tsunami and bushfire alert.

The emergency messages were decoded and transmitted as hexadecimal messages. Examples of the tsunami and bushfire messages are shown on this slide.

A series of tests were conducted in Quarter 3 of 2020 in Sydney and Melbourne using the GNSS receivers provided by South Bank. Bench tests were first conducted to ensure that the Australian taillight and created messages were

correctly transmitted through the QCSS satellite and received on ground by the South Bank receivers. An Android mobile application was developed by the project team in a fairly short period of time to mainly do three things.

One, to import the raw data from the South Bank GNSS receiver. Two, to decode and display the emergency warning messages using geofencing method, meaning that the warning message will be displayed to the user only if the users are within the affected area.

And thirdly, the mobile application will store the log file on the mobile device. Field tests were also conducted from the 12th to 13th of August this year to engage with stakeholders such

as the New South Wales RFS and SES and to obtain feedback from them about potential utilisation of this technology. From this trial project, the Australian tailored warning messages could be transmitted through the QCSS satellite for broadcast and received at any location outdoor in Australia.

The messages embedded in the QCSS early warning service signal can be decoded with a suitably designed mobile application. There were of course technical challenges due to the mobile application in alpha stage of the development and the usage of the South Bank receiver.

But with time constraint in this presentation, I won't go into the details of those challenges as they were already described in details in the paper.

The project team has also learned that the satellite-based GNSS emergency warning service technology could offer wide area service coverage in Australia and the service is independent of ground communication network. More importantly, this service can be scaled easily due to the nature of satellite broadcast which means

that the service is able to support high volume user in the event of a national emergency. Last but not least, the 2020 trial project is just the first step in building capacity

by the Australian Consortium to create, transmit and decode Australian tailored warning messages for satellite broadcasts. There are opportunities for stakeholder engagement and consultation with aim to establish strategic and operational plan for GNSS-based emergency warning service implementation in Australia.

Support and investment is also required to further develop the mobile application using next generation space and spatial innovation. The application should be well advanced to integrate information from various sources and

is well designed, fit for purpose, for use in emergency response and management. To end, I would like to once again acknowledge the support and contribution provided

from this organisation to the 2020 QZSS EWS trial project. Thank you for listening.