SUMMARY Location-Based Services (LBS) cover a wide spectrum of applications including fleet management, travel aids, location identification, emergency services and vehicle navigation. Applications of this service can be further extended if reliable and reasonably accurate 3-dimensional positional information of a mobile device can be determined seamlessly in both indoor and outdoor environment...

Urban ventilation plays an important role in regulating city climate and air quality. A numerical study was conducted to explore the ventilation effectiveness on the microclimate and pollutant removal in the urban street canyon based on the rebuilt Southern New Town region in Nanjing, China. The RNG k− ε turbulence model in the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) was employed to study the street...

Dense urban areas restrict air movement, causing airflow in urban street canyons to be much lower than the flow above buildings. Boosting near-ground wind speed can enhance thermal comfort in warm climates by increasing skin convective heat transfer. We explored the potential of a wind catcher to direct atmospheric wind into urban street canyons. We arranged scaled-down models of buildings with...

Cities impact both local climate, through urban heat islands and global climate, because they are an area of heavy greenhouse gas release into the atmosphere due to heating, air conditioning and traffic. Including more vegetation into cities is a planning strategy having possible positive impacts for both concerns. Improving vegetation representation into urban models will allow us to address m...

This discussion paper is/has been under review for the journal Geoscientific Model Development (GMD). Please refer to the corresponding final paper in GMD if available. Abstract Cities impact both local climate, through urban heat islands, and global climate, because they are an area of heavy greenhouse gas release into the atmosphere due to heating, air conditioning and traffic. Including more...

A precise GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System) localization is vital for autonomous road vehicles, especially in cluttered or urban environments where satellites are occluded, preventing accurate positioning. We propose to fuse GPS (Global Positioning System) data with fisheye stereovision to face this problem independently to additional data, possibly outdated, unavailable, and needing co...

—For positioning with Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) in urban canyon area, besides the weak signal power, the satellite signal may also be frequently sheltered and no power can be received. It is a great challenge for the GNSS receiver to keep positioning continuously. If the tracking loop in GNSS receivers can recover locking the signal soon after the signal appears again, it will ...

We study the problem of indoor positioning, which is a fundamental service in managing and analyzing objects environments. Unpredictable signal interference sources increase degeneration accuracy robustness existing solutions. Deep learning approaches have recently been widely studied to overcome these challenges attain better performance. In this paper, we aim develop efficient algorithms, suc...

Convective heat transfer coefficients for external building surfaces are essential in building energy simulation (BES) to calculate convective heat gains and losses from building facades and roofs to the environment. These coefficients are complex functions of: building geometry, building surroundings, local air flow patterns and temperature differences. A microclimatic analysis in a typical ur...