"Red Extensa de Sensores de Calidad del aire para una Administración del Tráfico urbano Amigable con el Medio ambientE” (Pervasive Air-quality Sensors Network for an Environmental Friendly Urban Traffic Management)

The project purpose is to integrate management needs of mobility and air quality into a single urban traffic management model.

The project implementation of the concept"instrumented city" is not only to achieve the goals of reducing pollution levels below the limits imposed by the European Directives, but also because it is essential to organise city traffic in a rational manner without causing excessive disruption to the mobility needs of citizens and achieve in a systematically way sustainable traffic levels at any time of the day.

The "instrumented city" concept enables to gather and elaborate in a cost-effective way all relevant traffic and pollution data to produce pollution predictions in real time, to calculate the effects of various hypothesis (scenarios) of traffic regulation, and to contrast the impact of the selected scenario on pollution at "hotspots" against new data collected by the same measurement instruments. Thus making a feedback loop onto the regulation system and thereby achieving fine-tuning between pollution results and traffic control measures taken in real time.

The project approach is highly innovative and represents a great scientific and technological advance in relation to current measurement and prediction of urban pollution models, which are difficult to integrate into existing traffic control systems.

Actions and means involved:

As in any other technology development and demonstration project, issues of greatest relevance are those relating to the adaptation of the systems used in the United Kingdom and the information elaborated for the specific conditions of the city of Salamanca where the implementation will take place. Although it can be considered that the "instrumented city" concept has already been sufficiently developed at scientific and technological level in various English cities (mainly Leeds, Newcastle and Leicester), the use of new measurement instrumentation recently available has not yet been – in a jointly and integrated way – gauged into practice.

The following points will require additional developments in this demonstration project:

• study of the "hot" pollution spots to be controlled in Salamanca
• analysis of the most suitable locations for the new measurement instrumentation
• data collection and transmission systems of the data collected by such instrumentation
• defining characteristics and performance of the database that will serve as a platform for the traffic management system
• selection of pollution prediction models suitable at urban scale, which are fed with the data collected
• the same for the traffic management models
• through application of traffic simulation models, accomplish measures to regulate or restrict traffic that are suitable for the Salamanca project areas
• development of feedback data systems for the results of implementing these measures on reduced pollution levels
• development of fine-tune algorithms of the feedback signal system
• conducting a large-scale project covering all the urban area of Salamanca, based on the results of the pilot phase

As for the most significant technologies applicable in the project the following should be noted:

• systems for data collection and transmission
• data processing and elaboration
• analysis and adjustment of air quality and traffic management models
• feedback signal systems
• adjustment of traffic control systems