Public-Private Partnerships in Port Areas: Lessons Learned from Case Studies in Antwerp and Rotterdam

The cost-benefit analysis (CBA) is a widely used approach for the appraisal of transport projects, but criticisms on it have led to the development of alternatives such as the BENEFIT approach. This book chapter analyzes three cases of infrastructure investments in port areas in Belgium and the Netherlands, by application of the BENEFIT approach...

Influence of the inhomogeneous troposphere on GNSS positioning and integer ambiguity resolution

The tropospheric delay is one of many error sources that affect the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) positioning solutions. The widely used troposphere models assume a homogeneous atmosphere so that only the zenith delay needs to be determined and is mapped through an elevation-dependent mapping function. This procedure is to reduce...

Precise point positioning on the reliable detection of tropospheric model errors

Precise point positioning (PPP) is one of the well-known applications of Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) and provides precise positioning solutions using accurate satellite orbit and clock products. The tropospheric delay due to the neutral atmosphere for microwave signals is one of the main sources of measurement error in PPP. As...

Assessing the performance of multi-GNSS PPP-RTK in the local area

The benefits of an increased number of global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) in space have been confirmed for the robustness and convergence time of standard precise point positioning (PPP) solutions, as well as improved accuracy when (most of) the ambiguities are fixed. Yet, it is still worthwhile to investigate fast and high-precision...

Funding Sustainable Cities in China

Currently, more and more people live in cities, and this leads to an enormous increase in global GHG emissions. Cities are blamed for the cause of environmental problems. Therefore, countries over the world aim to approach these problems by launching sustainable city programs. On April 22, 2016, China signed the Paris Agreement at the United...

The impact of shifting values on the role and responsibilities of the construction client in delivering public goods

In today’s construction industry we witness an increase in public private collaboration in the delivery of public goods. By transferring operational responsibility to private contractors, public construction clients have fewer possibilities to directly influence and steer the outcomes of these processes while remaining socio-political...

Towards an Effective Partnership Policy for Improving Urban Low-Income Housing Provision in Nigeria: New Institutional Economics Perspective

Recent critique against the past urban housing provision strategies in Nigeria was that the low-income groups are marginalised. It then led to the adoption of public private partnership (PPP) initiative with a view to pursuing the broad goal of housing-for-all in Nigeria. Most recent studies have however criticised the effectiveness of the...

On User Algorithms for GNSS Precise Point Positioning

Precise Point Positioning (PPP) is a Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) processing method with the objective of providing high positioning accuracy without the need for a nearby base station or dense network of reference stations operated by the user. To reach this objective, PPP uses the very precise carrier phase measurements in...

Formulating an effective public private Partnership policy for housing provision in Nigeria urban centres: A conceptual approach

The argument in the recent time was that the past strategies of the government in housing provision were obviously in favour of high income groups as the low-medium groups are victims of housing inadequacy in cities. The corollary to the situation resulted to the call for the adoption of public private partnership (PPP) initiative in order to...

GNSS algebraic structures

The first objective of this paper is to show that some basic concepts used in global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) are similar to those introduced in Fourier synthesis for handling some phase calibration problems. In experimental astronomy, the latter are at the heart of what is called ‘phase closure imaging.’ In both cases, the analysis...