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Wi-Fi Received Signal Strength (RSS, fingerprints) based indoor localization is promising and widely investigated with the pervasive deployment of Wi-Fi Access Points. However, the process to collect RSS, also known as site survey, is labor-intensive. Thus, we propose and demonstrate an efficient fingerprint crowdsourcing method in this paper. Specifically, RSS measurements are obtained and annotated with location tags while a participant is walking along a chosen path with a smartphone at hand. In the localization stage, we adopt the Gaussian Process based solution and propose a novel mean function selection method. Extensive experiments show that the path-based site survey can achieve a comparable localization performance to the point-based site survey, but takes less survey time. We find that fingerprints collected while walking are more suitable for localizing moving pedestrians. In addition, due to the sparsity of fingerprints collected through crowdsourcing, the proposed mean function selection strategy is advantageous and can reduce localization errors significantly compared to a baseline solution.

The deployment of an Indoor Position System (IPS) in the real-world raised many challenges, such as installation of infrastructure, the calibration process or modelling of the building’s floor plan. For Wi-Fi-based IPSs, deployments often require a laborious and time-consuming site survey to build a Radio Map (RM), which tends to become outdated over time due to several factors. In this paper, we evaluate different deployment methods of a Wi-Fi-based IPS in an industrial environment. The proposed solution works in scenarios with different space restrictions and automatically builds a RM using industrial vehicles in operation. Localization and tracking of industrial vehicles, equipped with low-cost sensors, is achieved with a particle filter, which combines Wi-Fi measurements with heading and displacement data. This allows to automatically annotate and add new samples to a RM, named vehicle Radio Map (vRM), without human intervention. In industrial environments, vRMs can be used with Wi-Fi fingerprinting to locate human operators, industrial vehicles, or other assets, allowing to improve logistics, monitoring of operations, and safety of operators. Experiments in an industrial building show that the proposed solution is capable of automatically building a high-quality vRM in different scenarios, i.e., considering a complete floor plan, a partial floor plan or without a floor plan. Obtained results revealed that vRMs can be used in Wi-Fi fingerprinting with better accuracy than a traditional RM. Sub-meter accuracies were obtained for an industrial vehicle prototype after deployment in a real building.

Background and study aims Endoscope reprocessing has been associated with a variable failure rate. Our aim was to present an overview on current practices for reprocessing in Italian facilities and discuss the principle critical points.Methods In 2014 the Italian Society for Digestive Diseases implemented an accreditation program in collaboration with an independent organization for certification and with the Italian Association for Endoscopy Technical Operators. During a 1-day site visit of the endoscopy center, two endoscopists, one nurse, and the representative of the certification body evaluated the endoscope reprocessing.Results As of July 1, 2020, 28 endoscopy centers had been accredited. Ten centers are completing the measures to correct deficiencies found at the visit. Three centers withdrew from the program. The accreditation program has found variations between the various centers, confirming the poor compliance with guidelines. Major deviations from the standards, established by the model before the site visit according to national and international guidelines, concerned instrument cleaning (44.7 % of the centers), instrument storage (23.7 %), and microbiological tests (31.6 %).Conclusions Our overview demonstrated the lack of many reprocessing phases, which are important to prevent endoscopy-associated infections. Accreditation can achieve a transformation in quality and safety of reprocessing with the Italian centrally-led approach.

On 28th July 2018, a massive landslide occurred in a mountainous area in Northern Thailand. The landslide after ten days of heavy rainfall generated the movement of uphill mountain soil into the populated village. This study presents a comprehensive failure analysis of local rainfall-induced landslides based on topographical and geological information. Rainfall measurement data were gathered from two rainfall stations close to the study area. The rainfall records show that the total monthly rainfalls in 2018 were significantly higher than the average monthly rainfalls over the past decade. Site investigation started with an unmanned aerial photogrammetric survey to generate a digital elevation model. Then, dynamic probing test, microtremor survey, and electrical resistivity survey were carried out along undisturbed soils beside the failed slope to evaluate the thickness of the soft soil cover on top of the rock basement. During the site survey, residual soil samples were collected to determine engineering properties in the laboratory. Finally, a slope stability analysis was performed to assess the landslide hazard based on the results of aerial photogrammetric survey, field exploration, and laboratory tests. The slope stability analysis and rainfall records revealed that the Huay Khab landslide was mainly caused by an increase in the water content of residual soils due to the prolonged rainfall which led to a sharp decrease in the shear strength. This leads to the conclusion that the proposed landslide investigation program could be used to assess the potential of landslide failure due to prolonged rainfall on a local scale.

The adoption of wireless communications and, in particular, Wi-Fi, at the lowest level of the factory automation hierarchy has not increased as fast as expected so far, mainly because of serious issues concerning determinism. Actually, besides the random access scheme, disturbance and interference prevent reliable communication over the air and, as a matter of fact, make wireless networks unable to support distributed real-time control applications properly. Several papers recently appeared in the literature suggest that diversity could be leveraged to overcome this limitation effectively. In this paper a reference architecture is introduced, which describes how seamless link-level redundancy can be applied to Wi-Fi. The framework is general enough to serve as a basis for future protocol enhancements, and also includes two optimizations aimed at improving the quality of wireless communication by avoiding unnecessary replicated transmissions. Some relevant solutions have been analyzed by means of a thorough simulation campaign, in order to highlight their benefits when compared to conventional Wi-Fi. Results show that both packet losses and network latencies improve noticeably., preprint, 13 pages (Winner of the "2017 Best Paper Award for the IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics")

This study aims to understand the influence of architectural atmospheric elements of restaurants (AAER) on users’ satisfaction and users’ visiting behaviors intentions (UVBI), the study sample consists of 160 users randomly selected in 7 casual-dining restaurants in Cairo, the survey technique was utilized, the survey questions formed 4 main hypotheses and 22 sub- hypotheses. To define the (AAER) an exploratory factor analysis (EFA) was utilized then a two-step approach was used: (i).The confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), (ii). The structural equation model (SEM) was utilized to test the hypothetical relationships and the proposed Good-model-fit. Chi-square, spearman testes conducted to examine the study hypotheses, (SEM) results showed that users’ satisfaction has positive significance on all (AAER), ambient lighting and sitting & furniture, dinning artworks, are the most influential on visitor satisfaction, there is a correlation between satisfaction with (AAER) and the desire to visit the restaurant again and stay longer.

The recent commitment towards a net-zero target by 2050 will require considerable improvement to the UK’s building stock. Accounting for over 10% of the services energy consumption of the United Kingdom, the education sector will play an important role. This study aims to improve the understanding of English primary and secondary schools, using national on-site survey data with several large-scale disaggregate data sources. Property Data Survey Programme (PDSP) data on 18,970 schools collected between 2012 and 2014, Display Energy Certificate (DEC) and school census data from the same period were linked and processed to form a unified schools dataset. Statistical analyses were undertaken on 10,392 schools, with a focus on energy performance, and the relationship to several building and system characteristics. The analyses may point to the possibility of assessing operational energy use of schools in a more disaggregate manner. New datasets with detailed and accurate disaggregate information on characteristics of buildings, such as those used in this study, provide opportunities to develop more robust models of the building stock. Such data would provide an opportunity to identify pathways for reducing carbon emissions effectively and provide lessons for other organisations seeking to achieve significant reductions for achieving climate change goals. Practical Application: Outputs from this study are expected to benefit researchers in various organisations to establish a basis for typical buildings and their performance, facilities managers to assess the operational energy efficiency of school buildings, and relevant public bodies to make informed decisions on improving energy efficiency of the school stock.

Recreational fishing is increasingly included in fish stock assessments globally. Nonetheless, the extent and precision of recreational fisheries data are often limited. Common methods to collect those data are on-site and off-site surveys, both of which are prone to specific biases, whose magnitude is widely unknown. The present study compares data from an on-site access point intercept and a simultaneously conducted off-site diary survey, separately targeting charter boat, boat, and shore anglers in the German Baltic Sea recreational cod fishery to identify specific biases in the data sets. The analyses revealed indications of avidity and recall bias that might influence catch and release estimates. Catch rates and release rates differed substantially between the angling platforms. The catch and release rates of diarists and on-site anglers were in a similar range for every platform, and reasonably precise with standard errors between 0.1 and 0.4 fish per angler and day. Recreational fishing monitoring approaches should include complementary on-site surveys from time to time to control for biases whereby the angling platform should be taken into account. The low explanatory power of commonly collected socio-demographic variables indicated that variables capturing the heterogeneity of angler behaviour should additionally be included in future surveys.

Municipal markets have played an important role in social, cultural and economic activities of the communities. Municipal markets can be seen as a symbol of tradition and as part of a city's tangible and intangible heritage. Municipal markets are part of the cultural heritage of their related community and therefore they must be conserved and continuity should be provided for future generations. For sustainable use of municipal markets, they should answer the needs of today's community by preserving their authenticity. The aim of the study is to identify municipal markets in Cyprus and propose sustainable adaptive reuse strategies for their future use. The study includes a holistic approach since municipal markets from North and South part of the island is observed through site survey. The research is also emphasized the significance of municipal markets as a part of Cypriot culture. As the method of the study, the model for achieving sustainable adaptive reuse of traditional marketplaces is used for developing strategies for the future use of the municipal markets. The results of the research address that the municipal markets are important for the cultural heritage of the related community. However, in Cyprus they used more for the economic activities, and important social and cultural values were ignored. Municipal markets should be conserved by considering the tangible and intangible heritage values. Local needs, beliefs, practice and traditions should be taken into consideration with a holistic approach in the conservation process of municipal markets.

The aim of planning the construction of the Grand Mosque of Universitas Samudera Aceh (UNSAM) was to help Universitas Samudra in Langsa city so that the construction of a new mosque in the campus environment has a large capacity with self-managed construction. The methods used for the study were literature design, site survey, interior spatial analysis, design planning. The findings and implications of a well design and planning is that it is hoped the mosque becomes the pride of the campus residents in particular and the people of Langsa city in general. It is also hoped to be able to support religious activities and worship for all academicians of Universitas Samudera.

Fingerprinting indoor localization systems exploit wireless signal propagation features to estimate the location of wireless devices, where the major challenge in practice is the all-consuming training process: it requires site survey to establish the mapping between the signal feature and the location where the feature is observed. In this paper, we present a Wi-Fi localization scheme based on channel state information (CSI) of wireless signals, which manages to relieve time-consuming site survey. In particular, we first propose how to automatically generate the theoretical fingerprints database based on the signal propagation model and geometric methods. Localization with the theoretical fingerprints database yields accuracy close to existing methods. Second, we improve localization accuracy by parsing the user’s trajectory instead of restricting to the single spot, where human movement features introduce more information for localization. Third, we present an automatic update scheme for the theoretical fingerprints database to improve time efficiency for localization, which can save 94 – 98% processing time for utilizing the CSI fingerprints database. We implement a prototype with COTS devices and conduct comprehensive experiments to verify proposed mechanisms. Results show that our design achieves 80% localization errors within $0.3m$ , which is $3\times $ accuracy compared with the state-of-the-art design leveraging CSI.

PurposeThis study aims to propose a systematic way of evaluating the impact of historic and current interventions on cultural asset values of monuments that have preserved their authentic functions so that future interventions can be better guided.Design/methodology/approachThe study focuses on the Mosque typology. The case studies are chosen from a region that has a rich historic background, but has generally undergone rapid urbanization and faces extensive restorations today. Conventional site survey, archive and historical research and visual analysis are made, but the evaluation process has been designed. As a result, scale and intensity of interventions and disasters and the vulnerability of the monument should be identified for each period of the asset. Variations in the intensity of esthetic or historic qualities and the environmental settings should be credited, rather than the utilitarian necessities.FindingsMosques and their environs are most vulnerable in terms of their architectural authenticity and site aesthetics.Originality/valueThe objects studied in the previous studies present a variation, but the majority of the work is carried out with conventional evaluation methods with the emphasis on building scale. However, the mosques are affected by the interventions and disasters, not only as single architectural entities but also as the focal elements of their neighborhoods. So, the intervention-value relations should be understood both for building and site scales. An evaluation process is proposed for understanding the change of values with respect to interventions and disasters throughout history by combining qualitative and quantitative techniques.

Since ancient times, different techniques have been favoured to provide the integrity of masonry buildings at risk from earthquakes. Earthquake consciousness and determination of related effective techniques have always been a challenging subject. In this study, morphologic characteristics affecting structural resistance of dry-joint masonry towers, and their impact on each other are examined with the help of the statistical analysis. The effectiveness of each characteristic is discussed in relation to the earthquake risk level of the regions to decipher awareness of precautions necessary for structural resistance of dry-joint masonry under earthquake risk in ancient periods.The methodology includes gathering morphologic data with the conventional site survey techniques of architectural restoration; visual analysis of the dataset; design of hypothetical towers by combining possible characteristics of real towers; quasi-static tilt analysis of hypothetical towers with MsPhysics 1.0.3 software; regression analysis of the collapse limits for different morphologic configurations with EViews 4 software, and the proposition of a vulnerability framework and application of the framework to case studies.The parameters affecting structural resistance are listed in the order of high to low impact as a staggering ratio, stone depth, ratio between block length and height, proportional relationship between height and length, opening area, number and position and the distribution of header stones. The application of the framework to case studies indicated consciousness awareness of the risk and the taking of precautions against lateral loading of dry-joint masonry in ancient periods.

International audience; With expeditious development of wireless communications, location fingerprinting (LF) has nurtured considerable indoor location-based services (ILBSs) in the field of the Internet of Things (IoT). For most pattern-matching-based LF solutions, previous works either appeal to the simply received signal strength (RSS), which suffers from dramatic performance degradation due to sophisticated environmental dynamics, or rely on the fine-grained physical layer channel state information (CSI), whose intricate structure leads to increased computational complexity. Meanwhile, the harsh indoor environment can also breed similar radio signatures among certain predefined reference points (RPs), which may be randomly distributed in the area of interest, thus mightily tampering the location mapping accuracy. To work out these dilemmas, during the offline site survey, we first adopt autoregressive (AR) modeling entropy of CSI amplitude as location fingerprint, which shares the structural simplicity of RSS while reserving the most location-specific statistical channel information. Moreover, an additional Angle-of-Arrival (AoA) fingerprint can be accurately retrieved from the CSI phase through an enhanced subspace-based algorithm, which serves to further eliminate the error-prone RP candidates. In the online phase, by exploiting both CSI amplitude and phase information, a novel bivariate kernel regression scheme is proposed to precisely infer the target’s location. Results from extensive indoor experiments validate the superior localization performance of our proposed system over previous approaches.

AimThe aim was to investigate the use of paper‐based and electronic prescribing and resuscitation aids in paediatric emergency care from a departmental and individual physician perspective.MethodsA two‐stage web‐based self‐report questionnaire was performed. In stage (i), a lead investigator at PERUKI sites completed a department‐level survey; in stage (ii), individual physicians recorded their personal practice.ResultsThe site survey was completed by 46/54 (85%) of PERUKI sites. 198 physicians completed the individual physicians' survey. Individual physicians selected the use of formulary apps for checking of medication dosages nearly as often as hardcopy formularies. The APLS WETFLAG calculation and hardcopy aids were widely accepted in both surveys. A third of sites accepted and half of the individual physicians selected resuscitation apps on the personal mobile device as paediatric resuscitation aids.ConclusionOur survey shows a high penetrance of the British National Formulary app, a success of NHS digital policy and strategy. Despite potential advantages, many physicians in our survey do not use resuscitation apps. Reluctance to engage with apps is likely to be multifactorial and includes human factors. These obstacles need to be overcome to create a digital healthcare culture.

Archaeological studies with the help of geographic information systems and remote sensing have been used in temporal, spatial, regional analysis and to investigate traditional and historical ways of human life. Remote sensing alludes to a wide variety of high-technology methods for collecting data pertaining to the physical or chemical properties of an archaeological site survey. The aim of this study is to identify the archaeological site of Makli graveyard and Banbhore fort through satellite images and explore the major land cover patterns on the southern part of Sindh province using geospatial technologies. Additional goals are to evaluate and visualize the Digital Elevation Model (DEM) for the southern part of Sindh province. A landsat-8 OLI / TIRS of 20th December 2014 and a DEM image were used to classify land cover and artifacts at the site. The result indicates that historical monuments at Makli, and Banbhore fort, Thatta testify in an outstanding manner, to the civilization of the Sindh region. geographically, its location is vulnerable around the river. Banbhore has survived such threats and continued to flourish as the only and most important port of Sindh.

Occupancy is relevant information about key aspects, such as energy consumption or comfort management. Energy-saving and environmental quality strategies can be carried out in response to real-time facility occupancy. Some relevant solutions to measure and monitor occupancy information leverage radio-based indoor localization systems and employ Received Signal Strength (RSS) as the main source of data for location determination. However, those approaches usually require a previous training and calibration stage that involves a time-consuming and labor intensive site survey process, and which is also readily affected by environmental dynamics. In this paper, we propose a practical passive localization system for fast deployment of occupancy services able to track unmodified and heterogeneous devices after a quick and straightforward training phase. We present an experimental validation of the system that was conducted for 9 months in a lecture building of 6000 square meters with 20 classrooms and 4000 frequent users, where the existing teaching computers themselves were used as monitors to capture 802.11 traffic. In this environment, we test different representations and metrics to process the RSSI information and perform a thorough analysis of some important design parameters, which have a direct impact on both accuracy and time granularity of the localization system.

Pedestrian is a term that describes the transport of people walking in a special place pedestrian. Surabaya is a metropolitan city and one of the cities that serve the community for a vacation like to Surabaya Zoo (KBS) is located not far from the terminal Joyoboyo. The present study was to determine the characteristics of the pedestrian (flow, speed, density), determine the condition of the geometry of pedestrian facilities, pedestrian facilities as well as performance analysis method used is the ratio. This research method includes several stages of site survey, then the data collection that uses several pedestrian walkways, noting the results of a survey conducted during the second day on Sunday and Tuesday at 06:00 to 09:00, measurement speed, geometry condition surveys and questionnaires about the identity, purpose and the purpose, time and distance pedestrian. The analysis showed that the dominant Pedestrian use the sidewalk at 8:45 a.m. to 9:00, the variable max on Sunday ie max speed of 64.78 m / min, max density pedestrian 43.47 /, While the variable-ratio 0.03 max on Tuesday that max speed 61.15 m / min, max density 37.51 pedestrian/, Max ratio of 0.032. While the performance of pedestrian facilities in the category "A", this means that the performance of pedestrian facilities in Surabaya Joyoboyo terminal region is still in either category and still be able to accommodate the number of the existing pedestrian.

With growing city density and mass gatherings held all over the world in urban spaces, crowd disasters have been happening each year. In considering the avoidance of crowd disasters and the reduction of fatalities, it is important to analyze the efficient spatial layout of the public space in situations of high crowd density. Compared with traditional empirical design methods, computational approaches have better abilities for quantitative analysis and are gradually being adopted in the planning and management of the urban public space. In this paper, we investigated the official documents, publicly available videos, and materials of the Shanghai waterfront crowd disaster which happened on December 31, 2014. Based on the investigation, a detailed site survey was conducted and pedestrian flow data were acquired. To test the influence of different spatial layouts, an agent-based simulator is built, following the ASPFver4.0 (Agent Simulator of Pedestrian Flow) pedestrian walking rules. With the surveyed pedestrian flow data, the original spatial layout of the Shanghai Bund waterfront together with five other comparison scenarios are tested, including both space design and crowd management improvements. In the simulation results, the efficiencies of different space design and crowd management solutions are compared. The results show that even simple crowd control measures such as capacity reserve and more proper route planning will allow for a positive improvement in crowd safety. The results also compare the efficiency of different spatial operations and give general suggestions to the problems urban public space designers should consider in high-density environments.

Opportunistic signals (e.g., WiFi, magnetic fields, and ambient light) have been extensively studied for low-cost indoor localization, especially via fingerprinting. We present an automatic site survey approach to build the signal maps in space-constrained environments (e.g., modern office buildings). The survey can be completed by a single smartphone user during normal walking, say, with a little human intervention. Our approach follows the classical GraphSLAM framework: the front end constructs a pose graph by incorporating the relative motion constraints from the pedestrian dead-reckoning (PDR), the loop-closure constraints by magnetic sequence matching with the WiFi signal similarity validation, and the global heading constraints from the opportunistic magnetic heading measurements; and the back end generates a globally consistent trajectory via graph optimization to provide ground-truth locations for the collected signal fingerprints along the survey path. We then build the signal map (also known as fingerprint database) upon these location-labeled fingerprints by the Gaussian processes regression (GPR) for later online localization. Specifically, we exploit the pseudowall constraints from the GPR variance map of magnetic fields and the observations of ceiling lights to correct the PDR drifts with a particle filter. We evaluate our approach on several data sets collected from both the HKUST academic building and a shopping mall. We demonstrate the real-time localization on a smartphone in an office area, with 50th percentile accuracy of 2.30 m and 90th percentile accuracy of 3.41 m. Note to Practitioners —This paper was motivated by the problem of the efficient signal map construction for fingerprinting-based localization on smartphones. The conventional manual site survey method, known to be time-consuming and labor-intensive, hinders the penetration of fingerprinting methods in practice. This paper suggests a GraphSLAM-based approach to automate this signal map construction process by reducing the survey overhead significantly. A surveyor is merely asked to walk through an indoor venue with an Android smartphone held in hand with a little human intervention. Meanwhile, opportunistic signals (e.g., WiFi and magnetic fields) are captured by smartphone sensors. We construct a GraphSLAM engine to first identify the measurement constraints from these signal observations and then recover the surveyor’s walking trajectory by the graph optimization. We can generate signal maps using the captured signals alongside the recovered trajectory. In this paper, we propose a WiFi signal similarity validation method to reduce false positive loop-closures and exploit the magnetic headings to improve the trajectory optimization performance. In addition, we propose to use the generated magnetic field variance map and the lights distribution map for localization. The efficacy of the proposed site survey approach is proven through field experiments, and real-time localization is demonstrated on a smartphone using the generated signal maps. The localization experiment was conducted by a single user with the same Android smartphone that was used in the site survey. Therefore, the usability of signal maps on other devices and the generality to other users have not yet been testified. We will leave these issues in our future work.

This study empirically investigated the major factors determining customer satisfaction with counter services in local government offices in Japan, comparing them with the results of similar surveys conducted by the author in 2020. This study considers visitors’ direct experience of counter services through an on-site survey conducted at a municipal government building, referring to (1) customer satisfaction research in various countries, especially the expectancy disconfirmation model; (2) the SERVQUAL model; and (3) subsequent methods that emphasise the customer’s direct experience. SERVQUAL, as the name suggests, is a five-group scale for evaluating service quality with respect to customer satisfaction. However, in actual organizational settings, five groups of questions may be burdensome to respondents and may reduce the collection rate. The author’s research involves conducting on-site surveys on customer satisfaction or service quality of the local government office using an original three-group questionnaire scale and tailoring the question items to a scale for Japanese local administration settings. The surveys comprise three categories of questions, referring to (1) customer satisfaction research in various countries, especially the expectancy disconfirmation model; (2) the SERVQUAL model; and (3) subsequent methods that emphasise the customer’s direct experience. A total of 1,000 questionnaires were distributed over four weekdays at the City Hall. As of September 27, 2021, there were 537 respondents (response rate: 53.7%). The regression analysis indicated that the independent variables of group C (service delivery) were most influential, followed by those of groups B (human-related factors) and A (office hardware) (adjusted R2 value: .58). Service delivery, human factors, and hardware aspects are important, in that order, to ensure customer satisfaction with the City Hall’s counter services. This is consistent with the results of the author’s Internet survey of users of Osaka City Government’s ward offices. Focusing on the second principal component of the service delivery category (C), promptness and short waiting times do not necessarily affect customer satisfaction positively.

Using on-site surveys conducted at Higashihiroshima City Hall in 2021, this study empirically investigated the major determinative factors regarding customer satisfaction in local government offices in Japan, comparing them with the results of similar surveys conducted by the author in 2020. The surveys comprise three categories of questions, referring to (1) customer satisfaction research in various countries, especially the expectancy disconfirmation model; (2) the SERVQUAL model; and (3) subsequent methods that emphasize the customer’s direct experience. A total of 1,000 questionnaires were distributed over four weekdays at the City Hall. As of September 14, 2021, there were 528 respondents (response rate: 52.8%). The regression analysis showed that the independent variables of group C (service delivery) were most influential, followed by those of groups B and A (adjusted R2 value: .57). This is consistent with the results of the author’s Internet survey of users of Osaka City Government’s ward offices.

This paper reviews the achievements of botanical recording in Berwickshire over two centuries with particular reference to populations of locally-scarce plants, using graphs and tables rather than distribution maps. It concludes that, while the time available for fieldwork over two centuries has been well spent, it will be desirable to consider how populations of locally-scarce species searched for and not refound are best recorded during the next recording cycle, so that trends in these species become readily available. This might be best achieved by intensive repeat-recording of each site of botanical interest in rotation, preparing a revised site account on completion of each site survey.

Despite the high standard guaranteed by 3D scanning technology, image based modeling establishes the most widely used technique for surface reconstruction, being a cheaper and more portable approach. The strong increase in the use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), is increasingly affirming and consolidating over the years. Being more cheap and portable than the active sensors approach, the combination of photogrammetry and drones is widely used for different applications both for large scale mapping and for documentation of architecture and archaeological heritage. UAV based photogrammetry allows for rapid accurate mapping and three-dimensional modelling. Over the last two decades, the study of archaeological sites have benefited from the constant evolution of sensor-based surveying techniques, finding effective application for purely visualization purposes or for the extraction of metric data. The Punic-Roman temple "Sardus Pater Babai" in southern Sardinia (Italy), has been the subject of a massive anastylosis. The close-range photogrammetry technique, exploiting the images produced by a UAV consumer and the GNSS system data, has allowed the creation of metrically correct 2D and 3D models useful also for an effective visualization of the information. A series of ortho-images has been extracted in order to represent plan, elevations and cross-sections of the monument.

The extensive deployment of wireless infrastructure provides a low-cost approach to tracking of mobile phone users in indoor environments using received signal strength (RSS). Crowdsourcing has been promoted as an efficient way to reduce the labor-intensive site survey process in conventional fingerprint-based localization systems. Despite its stated advantages, use of crowdwourcing for localization has issues of accuracy and reliability in indoor applications, in large part because of multipath propagation. This paper discusses and evaluates a Bayesian approach to localization of mobile users based on a crowdsourced fingerprint, in which environmental constraints as well as dynamic property of the mobile are incorporated as priors. Both a Markov chain and a semi-Markov chain approach are applied for modeling the transition and duration statistics of the mobile user across different location cells. Field test results demonstrate the effectiveness of introducing this additional information for localization in a real-world wireless network.

The extensive deployment of wireless infrastructure provides a low-cost way to track mobile users in indoor environments. Crowdsourcing has been promoted as an efficient way to reduce the labour-intensive site survey process in conventional fingerprint-based localization systems. Alongside its promising advantages, crowdsourcing produces a number of new challenges, including the heterogeneity of devices resulting in signal diversity and varying sensitivities to different access points. These are caused by different sensor specifications and antenna attenuation. These challenges are exacerbated by differences in the device populations between the survey and client phases. This paper presents a prototype model of a multiple-surveyor-multiple-client system to localize mobile users based on a crowdsourced fingerprint. A linear regression model is applied to calibrate across participating training devices. The conditional likelihood of a client observing an access point not visible in the training phase is obtained using a geometric distribution. The proposed system is able to achieve comparable localization performance. Field test results demonstrate the efficiency and benefit that the previously built radio map can be adapted to localize a new device that has not participated in the training phase with an average matching accuracy of 94% in a real world wireless network.

After a prospect has been evaluated and the decision is made to drill, the well planning and design phase can begin. We must define not only the best location to enter the target reservoir, but also choose the right surface location to place the drilling rig and the wellhead, without forgetting the well trajectory between the wellhead and the reservoir entry point. In Norway, as in many countries, drilling operations are subjected to a well integrity in drilling and well operations hazard assessment in our case: NORSOK D-010, August 2004. The results of this assessment, in the form of a report, are submitted to the local authorities in order to get the approval to operate. This can be a lengthy process, between four and nine months, and possibly longer in the case of operations in a high-pressure high-temperature regime. The Norwegian Petroleum Directorate (NPD) guidelines are not prescriptive, and leave the operator to decide what is necessary to operate with the lowest practical risk. A site survey is commonly acquired to assist in the safe installation and operation of a drilling rig, and aims to: • Provide information on seabed and sub-seabed conditions to ensure the safe, secure and efficient installation and operation of a drilling rig, • Identify any potential drilling hazards in the shallow section, ideally down to the first kilometer, • Assess the location of potentially important seabed habitats, and • Provide an environmental baseline survey (EBS). An exemp-tion is possible if such a survey was done in the previous three years. The first two points are usually achieved by acquiring dedicated high-resolution (HR) 2D or 3D seismic surveys, and mapping the mud floor to get an ultra-high-resolution (UHR) image by side-scan sonar or multi-beam echo-sounder technologies. It is worth noting that the NORSOK D-010 regulation does not specify whether 2D HR seismic or 3D seismic is required. The charac-teristics of the seafloor itself are assessed using geotechnical methods such as a cone penetration test (CPT). For cost and time reasons, the dedicated seismic data is often acquired as a grid of 2D lines around the planned surface location of the well, and typically covers a small area of 2x2 km or 3x3 km (Figure 1). This implies that the location of the well is essentially final before conducting the site survey, which in principle, should confirm it. If the well, and therefore the drilling rig, had to be moved by a substantial distance and ended up being close to the limits of the newly acquired seismic data, a new survey might be necessary. Although rare, such risks exist, with all the implications for the project in term of delays and costs. It is possible to achieve great results with 3D HR acquisi-tion. However, the costs are considerably higher than for the 2D case and are difficult to justify to the asset managers unless the reservoir is shallow and can be imaged with the same dataset, in which case it would be a fit-for-purpose and efficient solution. This is not the situation on the data used for this project, where the main target from the Upper Jurassic level is at approximate-ly 4000 m depth. HR seismic surveys, designed to image the shallow section, are normally acquired with shallow-towed sources and receivers, usually towed around two metres below the sea surface. This makes the weather conditions a key factor for the success of such marine operations. In the North Sea the acquisition window is limited in time (April to October) due to the prevaling sea state. Outside this time window and towards the end of the season, the field operations are often affected by considerable downtime, increasing the project costs and also potentially jeopardizing the drilling operations altogether. Moreover, in parts of the North Sea that are prone to local fishing activities, a ban on seismic acquisi-tion can be imposed in what should be the most favourable period for shallow-tow HR seismic, typically from mid-July to September. What if we could perform the seismic part of the site survey investigations in the comfort of an office? What if we could cover an area 10 to 20 times larger than the one of a 2D HR seismic survey, but with a full 3D perspective and at a lower cost? What if we could do this site survey at any time we want or need? Having such a solution at hand would have the following advantages: • More time available for the well trajectory design, • The same shallow hazard survey (SHAZ) data could be used for any subsequent wells over the whole licence or prospect without the need for another HR seismic acquisition, thus reducing the overall field development costs, • No direct dependency on weather conditions or seismic activi-ty ban for getting the high-resolution data, • Potentially more vessels of opportunity to run the environ-mental base survey (EBS) and geotechnical work seismic vessels are specifically designed for seismic acquisition, • The extent of the reprocessing area can easily be adjusted. It would increase the size of the project, with some implications on costs (computation time up to 250 Hz), but have little impact on the turnaround time, • Apply the shallow hazard reprocessing over all areas covered by 3D conventional data, or large parts of it, as long as the required input data is available, • Initiate consultation with contractors for the EBS (if required) and geotechnical work to secure the boat and the crews at the beginning of the season, and • File for work permit with authorities sooner without waiting for the HR data interpretation (after acquisition and process-ing). That is why we started looking into dedicated high-resolution processing workflows, with a strong focus on the imaging of the shallow section that is under-sampled in conventional 3D seismic acquisition used for exploration or field development. The geometry of a conventional acquisition spread does not provide seismic recordings at very near offsets. The nominal minimum near offset is typically in the order of 110 m. In practice, the minimum near offset for imaging is much larger due to the crossline offset on the outer streamers. We believe that multi-dimensional data reconstruction cannot provide the information that has not been recorded in this offset range. We have seen in recent years more and more efforts from the industry to use additional data that could fill the zero-offset gap, the multiples. The seismic data we have been working with on our PL817 licence (Figure 2) was acquired with multisensor technol-ogy (Carlson et al., 2007) that has been the basis of imaging with multiples for a few years now (Whitmore et al., 2010). Reassured by previous examples, albeit in a different geological context, we thought that imaging with multiples combined with an adapted high-resolution workflow would produce final images that would meet the requirements of a site survey. The licence partners correspondingly agreed to launch the project.

As natural disaster occurs, the local and the central government should investigate the damaged fields promptly, analyze quantitatively the degree of damage, and establish an appropriate disaster recovery plan in accordance with Framework Act on the Management of Disasters and Safety in Korea. The purpose of this study is to assess the applicability of UAV photogrammetry for the management of natural disaster. First, we suggest small easy-to-use UAV-based investigation procedure for natural disaster damaged area in the phase of disaster recovery in Korea. Before drone-based aerial surveying, the field survey can be performed with DGPS RTK for GCPs setting-up around disaster site. In this paper, we generate three dimensional terrain information and high-resolution ortho-imagery and then analyse quantitatively damage degree by natural disaster using commercial UAVs and drone mapping technique. Finally, we evaluate the mapping accuracy and work efficiency of drone mapping for disaster investigation application through comparing with traditional investigation work process which was dependent on labour-intensive field survey. The resolution ortho-image map of within less 5cm of GSD generated by aerial photographs acquired from UAVs at the altitude of 100m~250m enabled us to check damage information such as facilities destroy or the trace of soil erosion around the river flooded and reservoir collapsed area. In addition, three dimensional point cloud data of landslide-damaged areas enabled us to more accurately measure the width and the depth of outflows caused by landslides, soil runoff distance, and landslide damage area. The photogrammetry-based drone mapping technology for the disaster damage investigation is expected to be an alternative approach to support or replace the labour-intensive disaster site survey that needs to investigate the disaster site quickly and timely.

Ensuring electricity coverage for rural areas in Malaysia is still a big challenge due to the houses are in deep forest and scattered locations. The estimated coverage in 2015 is only 94% and still depending on conventional fossil-fuel generators. Considering full utilization of renewable source is highly recommended. Therefore, this paper proposes optimal design of full solar powered system for long houses in one selected area in Sarawak, Malaysia. Interestingly, the work has been started with evaluation and estimation of loads with site survey done to the selected area, which is Kampung Sungai Merah. The site visit has been conducted to survey and estimate the loads at the site. The design considers meteorological and climate data, specifications of system, and simulation configuration. HOMER tool is used in this work which comes with the optimization algorithm to search for the least cost system. The simulation results reveal the outcomes by considering three discount rates of 3%, 6% and 12%, and the system is presented with the best design for each rate. Lower discount rate contributes to higher PV and lower battery architectures as compared to higher discount rates. In short, it can be concluded that the system is optimally designed to be fully depended on utilization of solar as solid renewable source, which affects PV and battery architectures as two key design elements. Finally, this work should be able to provide the designer an opportunity to fully consider various options in developing the best renewable and full solar powered system for rural electrification.

Nowadays, all nuclear power plants including constructed ones and those under construction are coastal plants in China. Water resources assessment of coastal nuclear power plants in China is based on the Guidelines for Water Resources Assessment of Construction Projects (SL 322). However, the specific guideline for water resources assessment of coastal nuclear power plant projects, the Guidelines for Water Resources Assessment of Coastal Nuclear Power Plant Projects, has not yet issued at present. Based on the relevant laws, field trip, site survey, and operation experience of coastal nuclear power plants in China, technical points of water resources assessment for coastal nuclear power projects were analyzed, and contents of the guideline in China were put forward in the aspects of water usage rationality analysis, water source assessment, impact demonstration of water intake and drainage, etc.

The scientific direction within which the present research was carried out is the development of the theoretical foundations for the creation of real-time systems that allow, on the basis of the latest achievements in the field of GIS technologies, to move to the implementation of the concept of precise irrigation. The expansion of the principles of precision farming in the field of agromeliorative technologies is due to the need to take into account the spatial heterogeneity of the initial characteristics of reclaimed land on the basis of a specific, sectoral set of criteria and indicatorsBased on the results of the research, a conceptual scheme for the allocation of territorial control units based on data on intra-field heterogeneity of the indicator is proposed, an algorithm for grouping spatial data to assess the boundaries and spatial position of territorial control units based on GIS technologies is developed, two principal schemes of the site survey for the allocation of territorial control units are considered. The proposed algorithm, implemented on the basis of last generation geographic information technologies, makes it possible to effectively solve the problem of allocation of territorial control units, which is a key problem of taking into account the spatial heterogeneity of the initial characteristics of the irrigated area and has a direct applied value for the creation of precision irrigation technologies.

Recent developments in processor, memory and radio technology have enabled wireless sensor networks which are deployed to collect useful information from an area of interest. The sensed data must be gathered and transmitted to a base station where it is further processed for end-user queries. Since the network consists of low-cost nodes with limited battery power, power efficient methods must be employed for data gathering and aggregation in order to achieve long network lifetimes. In an environment where in a round of communication each of the sensor nodes has data to send to a base station, it is important to minimize the total energy consumed by the system in a round so that the system lifetime is maximized. With the use of data fusion and aggregation techniques, while minimizing the total energy per round, if power consumption per node can be balanced as well, a near optimal data gathering and routing scheme can be achieved in terms of network lifetime. Several application specific sensor network data gathering protocols have been proposed in research literatures. However, most of the proposed algorithms have been some attention to the related network lifetime and saving energy are two critical issues for wireless sensor networks. In this paper we have explored general network lifetime in wireless sensor networks and made an extensive study to categorize available data gathering techniques and analyze possible network lifetime on them.

Regarding the situation of slurry pressure shield tunneling underneath existing operating railway, traditional risk assessment method that takes the settlement risk of shield tunneling underneath the railroad as the evaluation objective cannot determine the risk development trend. Therefore, a shield tunneling underneath railroad risk evaluation model based on set pair analysis was proposed. First, according to the SPB shield construction mechanism, the risk source identification of the shield construction process was carried out, and the index factor system that leads to the settlement risk was formed. The importance of each evaluation index in the model was optimized by rough set, and then a five-element connection number model with objectively improved weights was obtained. Finally assessed the risk level of railroad settlement caused by the shield tunneling. This model is suitable for the actual construction of a subway shield tunnel, which is consistent with the results of the site survey, and has reference significance for the risk assessment of similar underpass projects.

FastGraph is a novel positioning approach recently proposed to address the challenges of positioning in large spaces. Wi-Fi-based indoor positioning solutions often require complex and time-consuming deployments. Fingerprinting, as one of most used approaches, relies on a radio map, usually created by manual site survey, a process unpractical even for small spaces. Moreover, the site survey has to be repeated frequently due to the changes in the radio environment. Wi-Fi-based solutions are also frequently discarded for applications such as indoor vehicle navigation due to limited accuracy. This article introduces FastGraph Enhanced, a new version of FastGraph, able to provide high accuracy positioning, opening new fields of application, such as navigation for autonomous vehicles. In FastGraph Enhanced, the 3D Force-Directed Graph-Based method, used to model the radio environment, is extended with new algorithms, allowing to improve, among other aspects, the positioning performance. The core advantages of FastGraph are maintained, not requiring previous calibration or knowledge about the space. The proposed solution was evaluated in real world, with very significative improvements in positioning accuracy when compared with the basic version of FastGraph (from around 5m to 0.5m), and with state-of-the-art solutions., This work has been supported by FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia within the R&D Units Project Scope: UIDB/00319/2020 and the PhD fellowship PD/BD/105865/ 2014.

Summary Currently, Oil&Gas industry interests are focused on exploration for new and development of already known deposits within the vast Arctic shelf. The complexity and high cost of offshore surveys in the Arctic region require the application of all existing data with maximum efficiency. Due to the relevance of standard 2D/3D seismic data inclusion for solving engineering and geological problems is increasing. The purpose of this work was methodology development for the integrated 2D/3D seismic data processing and interpretation for seabed, sub-bottom, near-surface, shallow and deep geohazards detection and identification. The shallow water depth in this part of the Pechora Sea was taken into account. The results of detailed site survey were embedded in the interpretation sequence. This technology is relevant at the stage preceding the site survey planning, in order to assess the geological conditions and select optimal area and scope of work.

Summary Shallow permafrost is associated with significant potential risks for offshore construction and drilling as well as ecological risks that may occur when the permafrost is disturbed due to the human activities. Identification and mapping of the shallow permafrost areas is one of the major tasks of the site survey investigations in the Russian Arctic. Due to the lack of engineering drilling data on the Arctic shelf, remote geological and geophysical studies, such as multichannel high, very-high and ultra-high resolution (HR, VHR and UHR) seismic surveys, are increasingly being used to map and characterize the subaquatic permafrost. In the paper, we present an approach to 3D VHR reflection seismic data interpretation that allowed us to the built a volumetric model of the shallow permafrost and assess its acoustic properties in the shelf of the Kara sea. To our knowledge, this is the first ever demonstrated detailed 3D model of the shallow permafrost in the Russian Artic.

Summary Mitigation of drilling risks associated with geological hazards is a priority task of the site survey offshore investigations. One of the most challenging regions for offshore exploration in terms of near-surface geological hazards is the western Artic shelf. In this region, the near-surface is complicated by presence of subaqueous relict permafrost, intrapermafrost and subpermafrost gas caps, pingo-like structures and various cryogenic deformations. The paper presents our experience of mapping and characterization of the shallow offshore geohazards (including permafrost) using 3D seismic data acquired in different frequency ranges in the Russian Arctic.

Laocai is one of the provinces of northwestern Vietnam that is at high risk of landslide. Typical natural features of this area are hilly terrain, complex geology, tropical monsoon climate with large annual average precipitation. People of ethnic minorities in the area up to now still affected by natural disasters. They desperately need appropriate tools for identifying and responding to this disaster. This study is a test fand quick landslide inventory map-making based on the application of modern technologies such as UAV/SfM to the building up of landslide identification and distribution maps in combination with checking and revising by site survey with the participation of local people for an area of Po Xi Ngai village, Lao Cai province. By recognizing the landslides on 3D images of the area in conjunction with the fieldwork checking, this method is expected to give local people the knowledge of landslide identification to develop the prevention and mitigation strategies by their capacity.

The growing population has an impact on the increasing need for housing. A comfortable house can be made if the ground is fine. Pengengat Village in Pujut District has expansive soil which has high swelling-shrinkage properties. This activity aims to provide an understanding of the characteristics of expansive soil and how to improve it. This activity is divided into three stages, including: 1) site survey, 2) counseling, and 3) creating a lime column model. The survey results show that people in Pengengat village do not understand the characteristics of expansive soil and they also do not know how to improve the soil phenomenon. The floors and walls of the house were cracked and some were split. Poor drainage conditions also contributed to the damage to their homes. After carrying out these activities, the residents began to understand the characteristics of the expansive soil and how to improve it. We make three lime columns with a diameter of 25 cm and a depth of 75 cm. The distance between the lime columns is 1 m. For evaluation purposes, we take soil samples from each hole, the soil samples will be tested to determine the level of swelling

Fingerprint-based positioning is popular and applicable for Internet of Things (IoT) applications to offer seamless, intelligent and adaptive location-aware services for IoT devices. However, it takes time and cost to build the radio-map. This paper proposed deep convolutional Generative adversarial nets (DCGANs) to minimize the site survey time and cost, and to mitigate signal fluctuations. The radio-map was designed for receiving radio signals from detectable wireless local area network (WLAN) and cellular networks in scalable environments. The proposed fingerprinting-based positioning is a sequential combination of the hybrid support vector machine and long short-term memory algorithms. The experimental results indicate that the proposed method achieves a promising and reasonable positioning performance for IoT devices in scalable wireless environments.

Objective To evaluate the comparability of commercially available practice site data from SK&A with survey data to understand the implications of using SK&A data for health services research. Data sources Responses to the Comprehensive Primary Care Plus (CPC+) Practice Survey and SK&A data. Study design Comparison of CPC + Practice Survey responses to SK&A information for 2698 primary care practice sites. Data collection CPC + Practice Survey data collected through a web-only survey from April through September 2017, and SK&A data purchased in November 2016. Principal findings Information was similar across data sources, although some discrepancies were common. For example, 56% of practice sites had differences in the reported number of practitioners, and larger sites tended to have larger differences. Among practice sites with 1 practitioner in the survey, only 1.3% had a difference of 3 or more practitioners between the data sources, whereas 63% of practice sites with 11 or more practitioners had a difference of 3 or more practitioners. Conclusions Discrepancies between data sources could reflect differences of interpretation when defining practice site characteristics, changes over time in those characteristics, or data errors in either SK&A or the survey. Researchers using SK&A data should consider possible ramifications for their studies.

Site survey and excavation, within the subject of Egyptology, have historically aimed at the ‘discovery’ of monuments and objects. Gradually survey and excavation methodologies have shifted to a search for information. Current excavation and recording methodologies provide an understanding of site formation processes, while modern site survey methods provide alternatives to intrusive—and by their nature, destructive—excavations. Contemporary challenges concerning excavation methods in Egyptian archaeology include excessive focus on ‘discoveries’ rather than information, and a general dearth of archaeological context, which often neglected or poorly understood. A perceived lack of practical archaeological training has been partially addressed by field-schools.

Currently, there are some restrictions on employees to access the network in the area of the container yard. This is not only because the operating computers are installed at the positions that are quite remote from the working areas in the container yard but also there is no wireless access network, or Wi-Fi, provided. Installing a fixed tower to transmit a radio signal providing the Wi-Fi access service is also not applicable in the container yard since the layout of placing containers is often changed periodically. Furthermore, the containers are made by metal and often stacked over that causes blocking of the radio signal resulting in a dead zone occurred in several spots in the area. Therefore, the work in this paper presents an experimental study for assessing feasibility to provide the Wi-Fi access service by using drones in the container yard. A business analysis, site survey, and prototype design are performed in the study. Then, the received signal strength, coverage area, and support data rate are defined as parameters to be measured in accordance with the drone altitudes in the experiments. Finally, the results verification and analysis are conducted for affirming the feasibility to use drones for providing the Wi-Fi access service in the container yard in the future.

With the rapid development of the mobile Internet, applications based on indoor localization have received increasing attention. In recent years, WiFi received signal strength (RSS) is widely used in indoor localization for the universally available WiFi infrastructure. However, the WiFi signal could easily be affected by non-line-of-sight and multipath propagation, which reduces the localization accuracy. In this paper, we propose an enhanced indoor localization system using multi-source measurements including WiFi RSS, ultra wideband (UWB) ranging, and inertial sensors to improve the performance. The multi-source measurements collected by users' smartphones are used for site survey in our system. To recover users' trajectories, we propose a crowdsourcing method to construct radio map. Moreover, a reference point clustering approach is used to improve system efficiency. A two-step localization method is proposed to locate a user. Experimental results show that the proposed system achieves better performance than only WiFi-based or UWB-based method.

The implementation and use of RF energy harvesting circuits has been demonstrated for many years, but only a few have been able to approach the use of the low power levels available in the ambient electromagnetic waves, produced by cell phone towers, digital television, WiFi, wireless equipment, etc. The objective of this paper is to discuss the factors to consider when an RF site survey is conducted, especially the details that are not so obvious when a handheld spectrum analyzer and antennas are used, and where the reading accuracy of each decibel is critical. It is also desired to present an overview of the results obtained for the outdoor measurements in urban and suburban areas. In this study around nine bands providing significant levels of power were found, with a maximum value detected of −23.34 dBm. All measurements were shared in a dataset through the IEEE Dataport.

Building energy renovations can effectively improve the environmental performance and energy sustainability of existing buildings. From 2007 onwards, the Chinese government has promoted energy-saving renovations of existing urban residential buildings. Nevertheless, various quality failures happen during the construction period in energy-saving renovation projects of residential buildings. Yet, the causes and their characters remain largely unknown. Through a literature review, this paper investigates the causes of quality failures. Validated through experts&rsquo, interviews, a total of 18 causes were identified in building energy renovation projects. These causes were analyzed from two main aspects: the importance of a cause (related to impact and frequency), and the level of effort required to address a cause (related to origin and scale), using both a questionnaire survey and a focus group. The results indicate that the critical causes of quality failures are working under high-cost and high-time pressure, adverse natural conditions, fraud of construction companies, incomplete construction site survey, poor checking procedures of supervisors, poor operational skilled workers, inadequate equipment performance, lack of experienced project managers, and incomplete building information in projects. The causes were classified as external and internal causes of building energy renovation projects. The outcome of this paper should aid policy makers and project coordinators to focus on critical causes of quality failures, and to develop effective actions and policy interventions to achieve successful renovation projects with high-quality performance.