Evaluation of road traffic noise exposure considering differential crowd characteristics

The primary objective of this study is to develop an urban traffic noise exposure evaluation method for differential crowd characteristics, which takes crowd distribution, ages and acoustic requirements into consideration. First, road traffic noise data are simulated using a line-source model, and crowd distribution data are obtained by the decomposition of demographic data based on the different building attraction coefficients of the heterogeneous crowd. Then, the noise response curve (NRC) of the heterogeneous crowd is established with the normalization of subjective feelings of respondents and calibrating the response level of each age group in combination. Finally, with the help of the proposed noise evaluation indicators, and considering the noise function requirements (NFR), the traffic noise evaluation of differential crowd characteristics is realized. The method is applied to a typical scenario, and the results and analysis verified the reasonability and practicability of the method in urban traffic noise exposure evaluation.