IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Magazine - September 2017 - 32

be linearly dependent on the amount of improvement
needed. This may not hold tr ue, and fur ther analysis
will show the relationship between cost and a certain
amount of improvement.
CONCLUSIONS
This article presents a method for identifying promising EO applications connected to the most urgent needs
that could benefit from improvements in three product
attributes: access time, update frequency, and horizontal coverage. To achieve this, we identified key elements
of the value chain of the Copernicus EO infrastructure:
users, needs, services, products, measurements, instruments, and missions. We created a relational database of
the first four elements and filled it with necessary information from various Copernicus/GMES and FP7/H2020
research projects. Apart from the data, the database also
contains the classification, characterization, and scoring functionality of the data. Database analysis resulted
in identification of interesting use cases for fractionated
and federated systems to address. The OUCIS for each
user case is a quantitative measure for identifying explicit user needs and the associated service's technological maturity.
The data-gathering process showed 63 users, 38 explicit
needs, and 96 different products across all six Copernicus
services. In the course of this study, a total of 48 use cases
were scored. The top use cases were as follows: Agriculture and Forestry: Hydric Stress; Atmosphere for Weather
Forecast; Climate for Ozone Layer and UV Assessment;
Land for Basic Mapping: Risk Assessment; Land for Infrastructure Status Assessment; Marine for Weather Forecast;
Natural Habitat and Protected-Species Monitoring; Sea Ice
Melting Emissions Assessment; and Sea Ice Monitoring:
Extent, Thickness.
The analysis showed that many use cases in the areas of
marine, atmosphere, and climate will benefit from higher
update frequencies; hence, distributed architectures, including FSSs, can play an important role in these cases because
they significantly reduce data downlink latency [23]. Conversely, the use cases connected with the land service will
benefit more from improvements in ground infrastructure,
including faster data analysis and dissemination times.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This study was conducted in the framework of the Operational Network of Individual Observation Nodes project,
and it has received funding from the European Union's
Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under
grant agreement 687490, coordinated by Thales Alenia
Space France.
AUTHOR INFORMATION
Hripsime Matevosyan (hripsime.matevosyan@skolkovotech
.ru) received her M.S. degree in control and applied mathematics from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology,
32

Russia, and her B.S. degree in informatics and applied mathematics from the Yerevan State University, Armenia. She
is a Ph.D. degree candidate and assistant researcher at the
Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology, Moscow. For
her master's degree thesis, which was developed while working at the Institute for Systems Programming of the Russian
Academy of Sciences, Moscow, she researched novel scientific methods for static program analysis for C/C++ languages and integrated them in state-of-the-art compilers. Her
research interests include complex systems architecture and
federated and fractionated satellite systems. She is a Student
Member of the IEEE.
Ignasi Lluch (ignasi.lluchicruz@skolkovotech.ru)
received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in aerospace engineering from the Universitat Politcnica de Catalunya in Barcelona, Spain. He is a Ph.D. degree candidate and assistant
researcher at the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology. He developed his master's degree thesis on novel
satellite navigation systems while working at GMV Aerospace Barcelona. Afterward, he joined the European Space
Agency at the European Space Research and Technology
Centre, Noordwijk, The Netherlands, to work with the
Galileo Evolutions Team. His research interests include
advanced satellite navigation systems, intersatellite link
technologies, constellation design, and federated and fractionated systems.
Armen Poghosyan (a.poghosyan@skoltech.ru) received
his Ph.D. degree in Earth and environmental sciences
from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2013 and
his B.S. and M.S. degrees in geosciences from Yerevan
State University, Armenia. He is a research scientist at the
Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology (Skoltech).
Before working at Skoltech, he worked as a researcher at
the University of Illinois at Chicago and as a consultant in
Armenia. He has strong multidisciplinary research interests that bridge various innovative scientific approaches
to address a wide range of applied research questions related to human-environment interactions from regional
to global scales.
Alessandro Golkar (a.golkar@skoltech.ru) received
his Ph.D. degree in aeronautics and astronautics from the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, and
his bachelor's and master's degrees in aerospace engineering from the University of Rome La Sapienza, Italy. He is
an associate professor at the Skolkovo Institute of Science
and Technology and interim director of the Institute's Space
Center. He served as a consultant for the European Space
Agency and was a research fellow and visiting independent
advisor at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) Pasadena, California. His previous work includes collaboration
with NASA headquarters, NASA JPL, the European Space
Agency (the European Space Research and Technology
Centre and the European Space Research Institute), and the
British Petroleum Public Limited Company. He is a Federal
Aviation Administration-licensed private pilot. He is a Senior Member of the IEEE.
IEEE GEOSCIENCE AND REMOTE SENSING MAGAZINE

SEPTEMBER 2017

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Magazine - September 2017