Atmospheric urban pollution: applications of an artificial neural network (ANN) to the city of Perugia

Urban air pollution is a growing problem. Large cities in particular show, at some point of time, high concentrations of substances dangerous for human health. The difficulty in forecasting pollutant's concentration trends with a reasonable error is still an open problem. In this paper, a new approach is proposed. An artificial neural network (ANN) is used to forecast short and middle long-term concentration levels for some of the well-known pollutants. The results seem to be in good accord with the monitored data and allow its use as the forecasting model on a 24-48 h basis requiring only the meteorological conditions and the traffic level. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.