The Trafair project brings together 10 partners from two European countries (Italy and Spain) to develop innovative and sustainable services combining air quality, weather conditions, and traffic flows data to produce new information for the benefit of citizens and government decision-makers.
MOTIVATION
Air pollution causes 400,000 deaths per year, making it first environmental cause of premature death in Europe. Among the main sources of air pollution in Europe, there are road traffic, domestic heating, and industrial combustion. Nowadays, the situation is particularly critical in some member states of Europe. In February 2017, the European Commission warned five countries, among which Spain and Italy, of continued air pollution breaches. These countries fail to address repeated breaches of air pollution limits for nitrogen dioxide (NO2) whose most emissions result from road traffic. The European Commission urged these Member States to take action to ensure good air quality and safeguard public health. In this context, public administrations and citizens suffer from the lack of comprehensive and fast tools to estimate the level of pollution on an urban scale resulting from varying traffic flow conditions that would allow optimizing control strategies and increase air quality awareness.
GOALS
TRAFAIR raises awareness among citizens and public administrations about the air quality within an urban environment and the pollution caused by traffic.
The project aims at monitoring air quality by using sensors in 6 cities and making air
quality predictions thanks to simulation models. The two main goals of the project are:
1) monitoring urban air quality by using sensors in 6 European cities: Zaragoza (600,000 inhabitants), Florence (382,000), Modena (185,000), Livorno (160,000), Santiago de Compostela (95,000) and Pisa (90,000);
2) making urban air quality predictions thanks to simulation models based on weather forecast and traffic flows.
Monitoring air quality means to set up a network of low-cost sensors spread within the city to monitor levels of pollutions in areas that are not covered by the legal air quality stations.
Predicting urban air quality is possible thanks to a chain of simulation models. The traffic flows are simulated from the real measurements supplied by traffic sensors, then the emissions are calculated by taking into account the vehicle fleet in the city. Finally, the air quality predictions are calculated using an air pollution dispersion model taking into account the emissions, building shapes, and weather forecast.
ACTIVITY PLAN
The project is divided into 6 Activities.
Activity 1 – Identification of Relevant Input Data
Activity Leader: Laura Po – UNIMORE
The goal of this activity is to collect the data required as input for the traffic flow model and air pollution dispersion model in each of the concerned cities.
Activity 2 – Devise and Organize an Urban Sensor Network
Activity Leader: Michela Paolucci – UNIFI
The goal of this activity is to analyze and improve the urban sensor networks available in each local area.
Activity 3 – Model Development and Tuning
Activity Leader: Alessandro Bigi – UNIMORE
The goal of this activity is the analysis, generation, and improvement of a traffic flow model and of an air pollution dispersion model for each city.
Activity 4 – Open Data Release
Activity Leader: Josè R. R. Viqueira – USC
The main goal of this activity is the specification and analysis of the dataset and metadata formats according to the best practices and standard. The metadata will be encoded using the W3C Data Catalog Vocabulary (DCAT) that will allow the populated dataset to be uploaded on the portals harvested by the European data portal.
Activity 5 – Use case implementation
Activity Leader: Raquel Trillo Lado – UNIZAR
The goal of this activity is to develop two end-user mobile applications to raise public awareness on urban air pollution, and two monitoring tools providing information on the air quality and traffic situation in the concerned 6 cities.
Activity 6 – Project Management and Dissemination
Activity Leader: Laura Po – UNIMORE
The goal of this activity is to monitor the progress of the Action, update the Action’s website, and carry out dissemination activities, such as the participation to conferences, meetings, the organization of public events etc.