RICERCA ITALIANA     

Research program

The geomatics in support of the actions of Government of the territory

University Co-ordinator

Università degli Studi di CAGLIARI - INGEGNERIA STRUTTURALE - ()

Research Unit Leader

Giovanna Maria Sanna

Description

Compilation of a quality manual for GNSS network services UNI ISO9001 certification.

The ISO 9001 standard makes a distinction between the requirements for products and the requirements for management systems providing products. The former can be specified either by the customers, by the management (as an assessment of the expected customer’s requests), or by strict regulations. The requirements for products, and in certain cases for related processes, can come for example from technical specifications, product standards, process standards, contracts, and regulations. The requisites for quality managements systems are specified in ISO 9001. These requisites are general and can be applied to organizations of any industrial or economic sector.
For their nature, GNSS permanent station networks must be assessed both for the quality of their products, and for the quality of the system providing the products. Thus, both aspects must be evaluated.
The ISO 9001 reference model specifies a series of actions which must be performed in order to compile a quality manual or to certify the quality of a product or service. These are:
• Identifying in order all the processes which must be managed, and which concur into making the products and providing the services;
• Determining for each process the key elements, noting what is necessary and what can be considered optional, but if implemented can bring an improvement in quality;
• Determining, for each process or set of processes, which checks to perform and which elements to check;
• Having all these elements written down in a form allowing to apply them without any uncertainty (e. g. as a checklist or a set of elements to report about).
Writing a quality manual is itself a process which must follow the ISO 9001 criteria, summarized into the “Plan-Do-Check-Act” rule.
The research project is thus divided in four phases:

“Plan” phase: in this phase a series of operations will be performed, among them:
• Collecting all documentation pertaining to the description of the requirements a real-time permanent station must satisfy. This documentation can be subdivided into normative regulations (like those specified in the terms for GPS surveys, the cadastral rules, and the IGS rules for becoming a GPS permanent station) and guides such as those by the IGS on building permanent station networks, those of the EUREF Real-Time Working Group, and the results of the previous PRIN (2004 by Prof. Sansò and 2005 Prof. Barbarella).
• Defining the needs of the customers, both public and private, about the technical level the service can guarantee: availability, reliability, and ease of access to the data both in real-time and for post-processing.
• Classifying the basic processes of all procedures concurring to the provided products, defining all physical resources, software and hardware used.
• Defining all the professional roles needed to direct and execute the macro-processes composing the management system.
• Defining the processes to be monitored and the kind of checks (automatic or manual) able to verify the correct operation of the system.
This phase, presumably more work-heavy than the others, will involve bibliographic research on existing regulations, and an in-depth study on the workings of real-time permanent station software. Regarding the assessment of the customers’ needs, the results of the research of international organizations providing the same services and implementing a quality management system will be used.
The product of this phase will be the quality manual, redacted following the ISO 9001 rules, and containing all the procedures to be applied and documents to be produced for each process, in all phases contributing to provide a real-time and post-processed positioning system.

“Do” phase: in this phase the procedures designed in the “Plan” phase will be implemented in the permanent stations network recently built in Sardinia. The network is formed by 14 permanent stations covering the entire regional territory and transmitting their data in real-time. These data converge to a control centre in Cagliari, where they are processed to provide network differential corrections. The data are stored on a file server to be downloaded by the users. The network was formerly the subject of a research by the author during the building phase and the broadcasting of differential corrections from each single station. The proponent’s research group also deployed in the university network a server able to send over the Internet the differential corrections of the working stations using the NTRIP standard protocol. The status of the network can be checked in real-time at the URL http://topografia.unica.it/index.php?option=com_wrapper&Itemid=82.

“Check” phase: in this phase the application of the quality manual will be monitored in order to evaluate whether the considered aspects cover all the necessary processes and checks. In this phase we plan to submit a survey to all interested parties: the customers, for whom a free subscription service will be activated, and network management staff. The survey will contain questions about all the processes and work phases, and an invitation to report any issues regarding overlooked problems. In this phase we also plan to publish the partial results of the research by submitting the quality manual for public discussion, first among the other units of the national research team, and later, through workshops, seminars, meetings etc., to the possible customers: regional and national agencies, users of different networks, instrumentation manufacturers, permanent station network managers, etc.

“Act” phase: this phase uses the results of the “check” phase in order to update and correct the draft quality manual, compiled in the “Plan” phase, and bring it to the final form. The fulfillment of this final product will not be an ending point, but will form a foundation usable to build quality plans on a national basis in order to obtain the ISO 9001 certification on the services provided by GPS permanent networks.