MESSAGE - Mobile Environmental Sensing System Across a Grid Environment

Mobile Environmental Sensing System Across a Grid Environment (MESSAGE)

@ Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering

A £3.5million, 3 year research project
Jointly funded by the Department for Transport and EPSRC
Beginning in October 2006

PROJECT OVERVIEW

The impact of road traffic on local air quality and individuals exposure to air pollution are major public policy concerns and have stimulated a substantial body of research aimed at improving underlying vehicle technologies and traffic management schemes to minimise the impact of air pollution.

This research however requires increasingly detailed knowledge of how traffic-generated pollution behaves in the urban environment (with factors such as street and building design, vehicle braking and accelerating patterns, individual traveller decisions and local weather conditions all potentially affecting the concentration of pollutants) and can therefore only be undertaken based on the availability of high quality, high-granularity spatial-temporal environmental sensor data.

A particularly exciting direction for future development of such environmental sensor data sources is the use of vehicles and people themselves as platforms for outward facing environmental sensor systems, enabling them to operate as mobile environmental probes, providing radically improved capability for the detection and monitoring of environmental pollutants and hazardous materials.

However, these developments present new and formidable research challenges arising from the need to transmit, integrate, model and interpret vast quantities of highly diverse spatially and temporally varying sensor data.

This project aims to address these challenges by novel combination and extension of state-of-the-art e-Science, sensor and positioning technologies, data fusion, traveller behaviour, traffic modelling and emissions dispersion modelling techniques, based on combinations of pervasive roadside and vehicle/person-mounted sensors.

This work will be at the leading edge of e-Science, stretching the capabilities of the grid in a number of important respects and also facilitating a step change in the capability of underlying measurement and modelling capabilities in transport and environmental science.