A new approach to link transport emissions and air quality: An intelligent transport system based on the control of traffic air pollution

Road transport has become by far the major source of environmental pollution and traffic congestion in urban areas. Though a lot of research has been done to investigate the functional relationship linking air quality and air pollution from transport, a further improvement in the knowing of this relationship is needed. The aim of this study was to analyze this relationship and to develop a more flexible framework to allow communication between transport emissions and air quality concentrations. This paper describes the development of this framework, suggests methodological tools to mitigate its problems and shows its application to the mega-city of Beijing, in P.R. China. The result of implementing this methodology would be a system providing high time/space resolution measurements of both air pollutant concentrations and traffic emissions data, as well as real-time transportation and dispersion modelling of those data. The key advantage of the system proposed would be the runtime integration of modelling, to interpret the data measured, with measurements, to validate the data modelled. The findings from the case-study of Beijing show that the integrated system can link traffic air pollution measurements through various modelling mo dules in order to automate transport-related air pollution assessment. (c) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.