Analyzing air pollution on the urban environment

Air pollution is one of the most important factor that can affect the quality of citizen life in the urban environment. Consequently, monitoring air pollution is currently a critical issue that needs to be addressed for enhancing the well being of citizens. This paper proposes a data analysis engine, based on business intelligence methodologies and open technologies, to support different targeted analysis on air pollution data. To analyse the problem from different facets, air pollution measurements are enriched with additional information such as meteorological and traffic data, which are collected through sensor networks available in the smart city context. This integrated dataset is periodically analyzed to generate informative dashboards based on a selection of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). The informative dashboards can provide useful insights about pollutant concentration at different time granularity levels in the urban areas and support a joint evaluation of pollutant concentrations with climate conditions and traffic flow. As a reference use case, open data on air pollution in the urban area of a major Italian city is analyzed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach in a real smart city context.