Cooperative High-Accuracy Location (C-HALO) Service for Intelligent Transportation Systems: A Cost Benefit Study

This paper presents a cost benefit study of a Cooperative High-Accuracy LOcation (C-HALO) service as a nationwide service capable of providing decimeter level positioning accuracy to enable several new applications across various industries. We survey and summarize work by others quantifying the benefits reaped from enabling applications that require C-HALO. However, benefits to the economy from enabling C-HALO for Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) have not been quantified in the literature. This study estimates these benefits. We also provide an order of magnitude rough estimate of the cost of implementing part of a C-HALO infrastructure based on N-RTK technology. Given the assumptions presented in the paper, our estimate of the benefits of a C-HALO service to ITS applications is on the order of $160 billion to $320 billion over a time horizon of 22 years. This translates into 1.1 to 2.2 percent of the US GDP. After researching several local and state-based deployments of C-HALO services, we picked N-RTK as one nascent technology to partially deploy C-HALO nationwide. We assess the current cost to be $560,000 to $1.6 million per base station covering a 60x60 sq.km area. A rough calculation yields a total cost of implementation to be between $1.6 billion to $4.4 billion. We conclude that the benefits for implementing a nationwide C-HALO service far outweigh the costs of deployment.