Comparison of Four Geodetic Network Densification Solutions

Geodetic surveying practices require the establishment of new control stations that are tied to higher order stations with known coordinates (reference control stations – fiducial stations), an activity known as densification. The coordinates of the newly established control stations are adjusted together with the coordinates of the reference control stations which are required to remain invariant along with their variance-covariance matrices (i.e. they are reproduced). In this study, we compare the performance of four different approaches that can be used to achieve this end for their optimality and sensitivity against potential systematic effects in the reference control station coordinates using a GPS network densification example.