Open-Source Framework for Modeling Emission Concentrations in Urban Areas

In the recent years, with the growing number of vehicles on the roads in urban areas, particularly freight transport, the level of congestion and air pollution have reached a concerning level reducing the quality of life. Thus, municipalities are seeking effective solutions to address these concerns. In this regard, environmentally sensitive traffic management strategies have shown to be a promising solution to protect densely populated urban areas from high emission concentration. However, an effective strategy requires accurate estimation of spatiotemporal dispersion of emissions. This is typically achieved by employing a chain of tools contains a traffic simulator, emission model and a dispersion model. While the first two components have been frequently used to estimate traffic-related emissions, their results cannot be easily validated against empirical measurements without applying a suitable dispersion model. In this study, we propose an open-source framework for the complete toolchain to estimate emission levels in 3D urban environments taking into account terrain, buildings, and meteorological data. In order to make the framework transferable o any city around the world, we mainly rely on publicly available data and only open-source tools. More specifically, we use SUMO and its integrated emission models (HBEFA and PHEM-light) in combination with the open-source dispersion modeling tool GRAL (Graz Lagrangian Model) to achieve this goal. Subsequently, this modeling framework has been applied to a district within the city of Munich to showcase its practicality.     «

In the recent years, with the growing number of vehicles on the roads in urban areas, particularly freight transport, the level of congestion and air pollution have reached a concerning level reducing the quality of life. Thus, municipalities are seeking effective solutions to address these concerns. In this regard, environmentally sensitive traffic management strategies have shown to be a promising solution to protect densely populated urban areas from high emission concentration. However, an e...     »