THE APPLICATION OF A NOISE MAPPING TOOL DEPLOYED IN GRID INFRASTRUCTURE FOR CREATING NOISE MAPS OF URBAN AREAS

The concept and implementation of the system for creating dynamic noise mapsin PL-Grid infrastructure are presented. The methodology of dynamic acousti-cal maps creating is introduced. The concept of noise mapping, based on noisesource and propagation models, was developed and employed in the system.The details of incorporation of the system to the PL-Grid infrastructure arepresented. The results of simulations performed by the system prototype aredepicted. The results in the form of noise maps obtained by a system are com-pared with some other solutions in order to investigate accuracy

The Inclusive City of Johannesburg and the Challenge of Affordable Housing

Johannesburg, as South Africa’s largest city and the most important economic center, still suffers under the patterns of inequality of the past. Although the spatial change has been rapid since 1994 after the post-apartheid era, the spatial divisions along class lines still remain. Strategic spatial planning strategies of the last two and a half decades were targeting the reduction of spatial patterns of inequality and exclusion by fostering compact and integrated spatial development on national, regional and urban level and currently the local provision of inclusionary housing. This study, based on literature review and census data evaluation, investigates the current challenges of Johannesburg, such as growing population, existing inequalities and the affordable housing backlog. Moreover, the current affordable housing programmes and new policy requirements in Johannesburg are described and analysed. Despite the release of numerous city-wide policies, such as the Spatial Development Framework 2040 (2016) or the Inclusionary Housing Policy (2019) the research shows that the situation has not significantly improved yet, which is indicated by a lack of restrictions in the requirements, implementation deficiencies and limited policy uptake in planning practice

Environmental Noise Mapping as a Smart Urban Tool Development

Since the European Directive 2002/49, large transportation infrastructure along with large urban areas should have completed strategic noise maps (SNM) and the relative noise action plans (NAP). The majority of European Member States (MS) has enforced this directive and completed fully or, in some cases, partially, with European smart cities to use and share the same criteria and methodologies and along with transport operators to communicate to the public the relevant results and respective action plans by ensuring the citizen’s awareness about the environmental noise, the quality acoustic environment, and their effect to their professional and everyday lifestyle. Today, 18 years after its first edition, the European Directive 2002/49/EC is needed to be reformulated to take into account all defects that have been identified and to adapt as well as possible to contemporary constraints. New methodology tools have been developed especially regarding soundscaping and environmental acoustic rehabilitation of urban areas, and the respective chapter will describe the progress being made on these smart developments of cities and infrastructures. This chapter will also evoke criticisms of these smart tools and will present results from several—state of the art—case studies especially regarding the practical and theoretical limits they face

Mass-Market Receiver for Static Positioning: Tests and Statistical Analyses

Nowadays, there are several low cost GPS receivers able to provide both pseudorange and carrier phase measurements in the L1band, that allow to have good realtime performances in outdoor condition. The present paper describes a set of dedicated tests in order to evaluate the positioning accuracy in static conditions. The quality of the pseudorange and the carrier phase measurements let hope for interesting results. The use of such kind of receiver could be extended to a large number of professional applications, like engineering fields: survey, georeferencing, monitoring, cadastral mapping and cadastral road. In this work, the receivers performance is verified considering a single frequency solution trying to fix the phase ambiguity, when possible. Different solutions are defined: code, float and fix solutions. In order to solve the phase ambiguities different methods are considered. Each test performed is statistically analyzed, highlighting the effects of different factors on precision and accurac

4Sensing - decentralized processing for participatory sensing data

Trabalho apresentado no âmbito do Mestrado em Engenharia Informática, como requisito parcial para obtenção do grau de Mestre em Engenharia Informática.Participatory sensing is a new application paradigm, stemming from both technical and social drives, which is currently gaining momentum as a research domain. It leverages the growing adoption of mobile phones equipped with sensors, such as camera, GPS and accelerometer, enabling users to collect and aggregate data, covering a wide area without incurring in the costs associated with a large-scale sensor network. Related research in participatory sensing usually proposes an architecture based on a centralized back-end. Centralized solutions raise a set of issues. On one side, there is the implications of having a centralized repository hosting privacy sensitive information. On the other side, this centralized model has financial costs that can discourage grassroots initiatives. This dissertation focuses on the data management aspects of a decentralized infrastructure for the support of participatory sensing applications, leveraging the body of work on participatory sensing and related areas, such as wireless and internet-wide sensor networks, peer-to-peer data management and stream processing. It proposes a framework covering a common set of data management requirements - from data acquisition, to processing, storage and querying - with the goal of lowering the barrier for the development and deployment of applications. Alternative architectural approaches - RTree, QTree and NTree - are proposed and evaluated experimentally in the context of a case-study application - SpeedSense - supporting the monitoring and prediction of traffic conditions, through the collection of speed and location samples in an urban setting, using GPS equipped mobile phones