Mobile Air Quality Monitoring for Proactive Traffic Management

Detlef Bahr and Christian Schlums

Abstract:	The mobility requirements of the modern industrial society increasingly confront to the growing environmental problems the road traffic brings. Apart from mobility, the economic and environmental-friendly transport of goods is another existential challenge, requiring innovative solutions. Eight business organizations, institutions and local authorities from the Braunschweig and Hanover regions in Germany have faced this challenge. In the scope of the de-central EXPO 2000 project “INFO-REGIO”. reference applications for an innovative, economic and telematics-oriented traffic management were presented exemplarily, basing upon satellite-supported positioning, communication, environmental measuring technology, and the networking of these by innovative system technologies. This report focuses on the description of a concept for a dynamic, area-covering monitoring of the air pollutant situation. For this approach, buses of the public transport system are converted to mobile measuring stations. During line service, on-board sensors continuously register the local concentrations of major indicator pollutants (e.g. CO, NO2). The respective position of the buses is detected by means of satellite navigation (GPS). The data are transferred, in regular intervals, to an evaluation module via a data link (e.g. GSM); from there, they are processed along with meteorological data and traffic information. Moreover, further critical, not dynamically measurable pollutants as benzene and carbon black, are derived from the directly measured indicator pollutants by means of a model calculation. The multitude of the measured and modeled data are used to prepare an area-covering, continuously growing air pollutant register. The registered environment data are to be integrated into a traffic management system, in order to give information, or to realize traffic-controlling measures which help to avoid the generation of critical pollutant concentrations early. In the scope of INFO-REGIO, it was possible to erect and demonstrate the fundamentals of this concept successfully. The target for further development steps is to expand this approach and to verify the applicability for a traffic management system.
Published in:	Proceedings of the 14th International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GPS 2001) September 11 - 14, 2001 Salt Palace Convention Center Salt Lake City, UT
Pages:	2647 - 2653
Cite this article:	Bahr, Detlef, Schlums, Christian, "Mobile Air Quality Monitoring for Proactive Traffic Management," Proceedings of the 14th International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GPS 2001), Salt Lake City, UT, September 2001, pp. 2647-2653.
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