Air Pollution Information System (APIS)

Innovative solutions are required to manage the problems related to the steadily increasing traffic. Among them, the air pollution problem plays a dominant role. In a global sense, air pollution is of interest everywhere. More specifically the problem of air pollution is mainly associated to areas with dense population and, thus, usually strong traffic. In addition, quite often heavy industry contributes its part to the air pollution in these areas. The investigation of the dynamic air pollution information system as proposed in this application may be restricted to urban areas without losing generality, i.e., the system may be generalized to larger areas, countries or even continents without requiring a significant change of the concept. Thus, for economic reasons regarding the costs of this project and for facilitating the testing as well, the dynamic air pollution information system is restricted to urban areas. Following the concept of the proposed system, public transportation means (preferably buses and tramways) will serve as measuring sources. During the service hours of these transportation vehicles, air pollution information data are measured en route together with the position of the bus or tramway. This information is transmitted to a central computing station and processed immediately. The full sample of all measurement data represents the current air pollution situation of the area under consideration.