Thesis project

Bachelor’s thesis: a web dashboard, built within the European TRAFAIR project, to explore air quality data collected by sensors across several cities.

The TRAFAIR project

The TRAFAIR project brings together 10 partners from two European countries (Italy and Spain) to develop innovative and sustainable services combining air quality, weather conditions, and traffic flow data to produce new information for the benefit of citizens and government decision-makers.

Motivation

Air pollution causes 400,000 deaths per year, making it the first environmental cause of premature death in Europe. Among the main sources of air pollution in Europe are road traffic, domestic heating, and industrial combustion. Nowadays, the situation is particularly critical in some member states of Europe. In February 2017, the European Commission warned five countries, among which Spain and Italy, of continued air pollution breaches. These countries fail to address repeated breaches of air pollution limits for nitrogen dioxide (NO2), most of whose emissions result from road traffic. The European Commission urged these Member States to take action to ensure good air quality and safeguard public health. In this context, public administrations and citizens suffer from the lack of comprehensive and fast tools to estimate the level of pollution on an urban scale resulting from varying traffic flow conditions, which would allow optimizing control strategies and increasing air quality awareness.

Goals

TRAFAIR raises awareness among citizens and public administrations about the air quality within an urban environment and the pollution caused by traffic. The two main goals of the project are:

1. monitoring urban air quality by using sensors in 6 European cities: Zaragoza (600,000 inhabitants), Florence (382,000), Modena (185,000), Livorno (160,000), Santiago de Compostela (95,000) and Pisa (90,000);
2. making urban air quality predictions thanks to simulation models based on weather forecasts and traffic flows.

What did I do?

My thesis project aimed to create a web application showing air quality data and statistics from the sensors located in the different cities (Modena, Santiago de Compostela, Zaragoza). The application is used by public administrations to monitor air quality in the urban context.

It was built with the Angular framework. The OpenLayers JavaScript library was used to display geographic data and create the interactive maps, while all the charts were created with the Chart.js JavaScript library.

TRAFAIR - Air quality dashboard

Specifically, I worked on the following pages.

Home page

Sensor map

Sensor charts

Chart of a selected pollutant

Global statistics

Locations

Statistics for a selected location

Technologies used

• HTML
• Angular framework
• JavaScript libraries:
  • Chart.js: used to create all the charts in the pages listed above.
  • OpenLayers: used to create all the maps in the pages listed above.