Design of an efficient mobile measurement system for urban pollution monitoring

In recent years, the pollution monitoring in urban areas has become one of the most critical issues for local public authorities, which wish (or must) verify that pollution levels not exceed limits considered unsafe or that are regulated by local laws. Generally, the pollution monitoring is performed by using measurement stations located in few points of the region of interest since these stations are generally characterized by high costs, weights, and dimensions. Then, the pollution levels over the remaining area are predicted by means of suitable interpolation models. Due to the great variety of urban scenarios, it becomes very difficult to obtain reliable pollution levels in area in which the measurements has not been directly taken but only predicted. Consequently, the pollution monitoring can suffer of a lack of reliable information indispensable for the actuation of proper environmental management policies. In this framework, this paper proposes a mobile measurement system for the real time monitoring of environmental pollutions over urban areas. The proposed approach is based on the use of a set of vehicles, typically employed for public transportation inside the urban area, equipped with the proposed mobile measurement system allowing it to measure, store, and transmit the acquired data to a remote supervisor unit somewhere on the path followed by the vehicles. Particular attention has been paid on the definition of the metrological characteristics of the measurement devices with the aims of complying with the applicable European Directives accuracy requirements and of selecting a suitable trade-off between accuracy and cost. The experimental measurement campaign performed on a suitable urban scenario has confirmed the goodness of the proposed system.