This thesis is in support of the Precision Personnel Locator (PPL) project being conducted by Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI). The overall goal of the PPL project is to locate firemen and other emergency personnel in buildings using Radio Frequency (RF) techniques. The aspiration is to prevent a tragedy similar to the Worcester Cold Storage fire of 1999. The Mantenna homing wand is a spinoff of the PPL system which uses the Near Field properties of Very Low Frequency (VLF band) waves. The Mantenna has been used to successfully demonstrate the ability to locate targets inside harsh RF environments and other radio opaque environments where normal radiation field based systems have degraded performance, such as commercial, industrial, and apartment buildings. This thesis builds upon the Mantenna rescue device by construction of a transmitter subsystem which is physically smaller than the previous version by redesign of the compact VLF antenna. Additionally, exploitation of the approach used by the Mantenna for homing purposes is explored for full location estimation. This work provides the theoretical background and proof of concept test of a Near Field based location system. Simulation and test results are compared for a minimal configuration involving a single receiver.

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Congestion and oversaturated roads pose significant problems and create delays in every major city in the world. Before this problem can be addressed, we must know how much traffic is flowing over the links in the network. We transform a road network into a directed graph with a network flow function, and ask the question, “What subset of vertices (intersections) should be monitored such that knowledge of the flow passing through these vertices is sufficient to calculate the flow everywhere in the graph?” To minimize the cost of placing sensors, we seek the smallest number of monitored vertices. This is known as the Sensor Location Problem (SLP). We explore conditions under which a set of monitored vertices produces a unique solution to the problem and disprove a previous result published on the problem. Finally, we explore a matrix formulation of the problem and present cases when the flow can or cannot be calculated on the graph.

Due to the growth of milk marketing areas in the Intermountain West, a study was made to determine the most advantageous allocation of producer milk to twelve selected processing demand areas and to calculate location differentials between these same markets. A theoretical determination of location differentials and of the allocation of milk supply areas to processing centers were made using supply-push and demand-pull price alignment models developed by Associated Milk Producers, Inc., for the months of November 1979 and June 1980. Grade A producer mil k from the six member cooperatives of Western Dairymen' s Cooperative, Inc., was used in the study. From the computed location differentials, a framework was developed from which milk cooperatives in the Intermountain West could use to base future policy decisions.

Cover title. Includes bibliographical references.

We present a low cost and easily deployed infrastructure for location aware computing that is built using standard Bluetooth® technologies and personal computers. Mobile devices are able to determine their location to room-level granularity with existing bluetooth technology, and to even greater resolution with the use of the recently adopted bluetooth 1.2 specification, all while maintaining complete anonymity. Various techniques for improving the speed and resolution of the system are described, along with their tradeoffs in privacy. The system is trivial to implement on a large scale – our network covering 5,000 square meters was deployed by a single student over the course of a few days at a cost of less than US$1,000. / Singapore-MIT Alliance (SMA)

With the rapid development of wireless networking technology and the great growth of service demand, accurate wireless location estimation has gained considerable attention. Most wireless location system may suffer from non-line-of-sight (NLOS) propagation error, which leads to a severe degradation of position accuracy. In this thesis, we propose a hybrid TOA/AOA (time of arrival/ angle of arrival) non-line-of-sight identification and wireless location technology to cope with NLOS condition. This algorithm can simultaneously determine the number of line-of-sight (LOS) base stations (BSs) and identify them. The identification part is to collect all TOA and AOA parameters from all BSs and to use residual information to detetmine whether the NLOS error is present in measurements. The localization method only processes the LOS measurements to avoid the NLOS error and increases position accurary. The simulation results show that the location system with TOA measurements can identify three or more LOS-BSs. The system has a high identification accuracy when the number of LOS-BSs is more than three. When the number of LOS-BSs is three, the degraded identification capability leads to larger position errors. When the AOA information is available in the positioning system, the TOA is combined with AOA because the property of the AOA localization method which needs only two measurements to locate the MS makes the location system capable of identifying two LOS-BSs. When the number of LOS-BSs is two, the combination of TOA and AOA measurements maintains a higher NLOS identification accuracy and make its location performance remarkably promoted.

In this study methods are developed for locating places of education, employment opportunities and housing.The first model allocates places for upper secondary (Am. High School) education in space with the aid of a location-allocation model using capacity constraints and distance-dependent demand. The solution is obtained by an heuristic node-swapping method. For each line of study it sets down the number of locations that could offer such courses, their physical location, their capacities and their geographical catchment areas. The educational resources are allocated according to a criteria that minimizes a weighted sum of geographical distances between the schools and their potential pupils, their applicants and the labour market. In connection with applications of the model, analyses suggest that the location and dimensioning of upper secondary education are primarily steered by the local pupil demand, secondly by the desire for an even regional allocation and thirdly by the demand from the local labour market.In the second model, government employment programmes are allocated among sectors of the economy and sub-districts within a municipality over time. The aim is to offer a sufficient number of employment opportunities for the lowest possible level of public expenditure - irrespective of which support sectors happened to have resources at their disposal at the time of investigation. Given frequencies of persons employed are sought for various groups of people, e.g. men, women, or peripheral residents in the municipality. One general result is that the existing allocation of support resources on sectors only yields less than half as many employment opportunities as could be provided with the same resource input allocated in a different way. Even with a more efficent resource allocation, the amount of support needs to be at least doubled in order to produce national average levels of employment over the long term, within the studied municipality.The third model represents a local housing market with a varying housing stock and population. The changes of accommodation are described for the individual households, giving information on preferences and restrictions. A large proportion of home moves are due to changes in the household composition, changes which are explained internally within the model. The model shows how the new production of housing should be distributed by types of dwelling in different geographically delimited areas over time. The individual's welfare losses during the wait for a new place to live and the costs of empty accommodation are weighed against each other in the allocation algorithm of the model. The model is qualitatively different from traditional models using aggregated data. However models with data on individuals, individual decision processes, and interplay between different actors can probably be developed into usable bases for decision. / digitalisering@umu

As the increase of house renters who working in other cities and also the decrease of the number of household washing machine within high price, more and more people choose not to do the laundry at home. For this reason, launderettes have became popular since laundry-helping stores charge considerably more than self-service laundry shops and most customers are not willing to have their underwear washed by others. The demand for launderettes has been dramatically increase for the consideration of the economical expense of doing laundry in the launderette than paying someone else to do the laundry. Therefore, a good location of a launderette would certainly make huge profit under the circumstances. This research aims to assist the potential launderette franchisees to identify correct locations to run the business. Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) is mainly adapted in this research which classifies the hierarchy as four evaluation factors including business benefit, competition level, base of operation and transportation. Furthermore, twelve guidelines of address selecting deriving from each four evaluation factors which are analyzed and sorted by experts with the weights, scores and alternatives to categorize four districts consisting of residential area, industrial area, school area and commercial area. Once the proper area is determined by first Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), the precise address in the proper one is able to be predicted by second Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). Hence, the launderette locating exact shop address in the certain area would be evaluated the natural conditions. After Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) was implemented in the first time, four options and the weight between every hierarchy could be clearly known. This outcome makes potential franchisees understand the proper location they may identify to make more profit in the circumstances. Then, the potential launderette franchisees are able to choose the exact address of their shops in the selected location to increase their revenue after the second Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) is conducted. The result of this research provides potential launderette franchisees with a guide to evaluate whether the launderette locates in an appropriate place and a distinct resolution of decision making for launderette location.

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