The impact of road traffic on local air quality is a major public policy concern and has stimulated a substantial body of research aimed at improving underlying vehicle and traffic management technologies and informing public policy action. Recent work has begun to exploit the capability of a variety of vehicle-based, person-based and infrastructure-based sensor systems to collect real time data on important aspects of driver and traffic behaviour, vehicle emissions, pollutant dispersion, concentration and human exposure. The variety, pervasiveness and scale of these sensor data will increase significantly in the future as a result of technological developments that will enable sensors to become cheaper, smaller and lower in power consumption. This will open up enormous opportunities to improve our understanding of urban air pollution and hence improve urban air quality. However, handing the vast quantities of real time data that will be generated by these sensors will be a formidable task and will require the application of advanced forms computing, communication and positioning technologies and the development of ways of combining and interpreting many different forms of data. Technologies developed in EPSRC's e-Science research programme offer many of the tools necessary to meet these challenges. The aim of the PMESG project is to take these tools and by extending them where necessary in appropriate ways develop and demonstrate practical applications of e-Science technologies to enable researchers and practitioners to coherently combine data from disparate environmental sensors and to develop models that could lead to improved urban air quality. The PMESG project is led by Imperial College London, and comprises a consortium of partners drawn from the Universities of Cambridge, Southampton, Newcastle and Leeds who will work closely with one another and with a number of major industrial partners and local authorities. Real applications will be carried out in London, Cambridge, Gateshead and Leicester which will build on the Universities' existing collaborative arrangements with the relevant local authorities in each site and will draw on substantial existing data resources, sensor networks and ongoing EPSRC and industrially funded research activities. These applications will address important problems that to date have been difficult or impossible for scientists and engineers working is this area of approach, due to a lack or relevant data. These problems are of three main types; (i) measuring human exposure to pollutants, (ii) the validation of various detailed models of traffic behaviour and pollutant emission and dispersion and (iii) the development of transport network management and control strategies that take account not just of traffic but also air quality impacts. The various case studies will look at different aspects of these questions and use a variety of different types of sensor systems to do so. In particular, the existing sensor networks in each city will be enhanced by the selective deployment of a number of new sensor types (both roadside and on-vehicle/person) to increase the diversity of sensor inputs. The e-Science technologies will be highly general in nature meaning that will have applications not only in transport and air quality management but also in many other fields that generate large volume of real time location-specific sensor data.Each institution participating in this project will be submitting their resource summary individually to Je-s. The resources listed within this Je-S Proposal are solely those of Imperial College with other institutions submitting their costs seperately, with one case for support.

The impact of road traffic on local air quality is a major public policy concern and has stimulated a substantial body of researchaimed at improving underlying vehicle and traffic management technologies and informing public policy action. Recent work hassought to use a variety of vehicle-based, person-based and infrastructure-based sensor systems to collect data on key aspects ofdriver and traffic behaviour, emissions, pollutant concentrations and exposure. The variety and pervasiveness of the sensor inputsavailable will increase significantly in the future as a result both of the increasingly widespread penetration of existingtechnologies (e.g., GPS based vehicle tracking, CANbus interfaces to on-board engine management system data) within thevehicle parc and the introduction of new technologies (such as e.g., UV sensing and nanotechnology based micro sensors). Aparticularly exciting direction for future development will be in the use of vehicles as platforms for outward facing environmentalsensor systems, allowing vehicles to operate as mobile environmental probes, providing radically improved capability for thedetection 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. Our approach in thisproject is to address these challenges by novel combination and extension of state-of-the-art eScience, sensor, positioning andmodelling (data fusion, traffic, transport, emissions, dispersion) technologies. By so doing, we aim to develop the capability tomeasure, model and predict a wide range of environmental pollutants and hazards (both transport related and otherwise) using agrid of pervasive roadside and vehicle-mounted sensors. This work will be at the leading edge of eScience, stretching thecapabilities of the grid in a number of aspects of the processing of massive volumes of sensor data.

This project is part of a collaborative eScience pilot project.Please see the corresponding application from Imperial College for the summary of the project

The impact of road traffic on local air quality is a major public policy concern and has stimulated a substantial body of research aimed at improving underlying vehicle and traffic management technologies and informing public policy action. Recent work has begun to exploit the capability of a variety of vehicle-based, person-based and infrastructure-based sensor systems to collect real time data on important aspects of driver and traffic behaviour, vehicle emissions, pollutant dispersion, concentration and human exposure.The variety, pervasiveness and scale of these sensor data will increase significantly in the future as a result of technological developments that will enable sensors to become cheaper, smaller and lower in power consumption. This will open up enormous opportunities to improve our understanding of urban air pollution and hence improve urban air quality. However, handing the vast quantities of real time data that will be generated by these sensors will be a formidable task and will require the application of advanced forms computing, communication and positioning technologies and the development of ways of combining and interpreting many different forms of data.Technologies developed in EPSRC's e-Science research programme offer many of the tools necessary to meet these challenges. The aim of the PMESG project is to take these tools and by extending them where necessary in appropriate ways develop and demonstrate practical applications of e-Science technologies to enable researchers and practitioners to coherently combine data from disparate environmental sensors and to develop models that could lead to improved urban air quality.The PMESG project is led by Imperial College London, and comprises a consortium of partners drawn from the Universities of Cambridge, Southampton, Newcastle and Leeds who will work closely with one another and with a number of major industrial partners and local authorities.Real applications will be carried out in London, Cambridge, Gateshead and Leicester which will build on the Universities' existing collaborative arrangements with the relevant local authorities in each site and will draw on substantial existing data resources, sensor networks and ongoing EPSRC and industrially funded research activities. These applications will address important problems that to date have been difficult or impossible for scientists and engineers working is this area of approach, due to a lack or relevant data. These problems are of three main types; (i) measuring human exposure to pollutants, (ii) the validation of various detailed models of traffic behaviour and pollutant emission and dispersion and (iii) the development of transport network management and control strategies that take account not just of traffic but also air quality impacts. The various case studies will look at different aspects of these questions and use a variety of different types of sensor systems to do so. In particular, the existing sensor networks in each city will be enhanced by the selective deployment of a number of new sensor types (both roadside and on-vehicle/person) to increase the diversity of sensor inputs.The e-Science technologies will be highly general in nature meaning that will have applications not only in transport and air quality management but also in many other fields that generate large volume of real time location-specific sensor data.

One of the greatest challenges facing civil engineers in the 21st century is the stewardship of ageing infrastructure. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the networks of tunnels, pipelines and bridges that lie beneath and above the major cities around the world. Much of this infrastructure was constructed more than half a century ago and there is widespread evidence of its deterioration. Tunnels, particularly old ones, are prone to being influenced by activities such as adjacent construction, for instance piling, deep excavations and other tunnel construction. Excessive leakage and pipe bursts are frequent and usually unanticipated. Importantly, underground structures often cannot be inspected when they are being used by trains or due to other physical constraints. The fragility of old infrastructure also presents a challenge for new construction in congested urban environments. Little is known of the long-term performance of such infrastructure. These uncertainties and the importance of safety to users and consumers prompted the initiation of recent research projects investigating the prospect of damage detection and decision making and the use of novel materials to mitigate damage. Advances in the development of innovative sensors such as fibre optic sensors and micro electrical mechanical sensors (MEMS) offer intriguing possibilities that can radically alter the paradigms underlying existing methods of condition assessment and monitoring. Future monitoring systems will undoubtedly comprise Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) and will be designed around the capabilities of autonomous nodes. Each node in the network will integrate specific sensing capabilities with communication, data processing and power supply. It is therefore the objective of this proposal to demonstrate how large numbers of sensors can be integrated into large-scale engineering systems to improve performance and extend the lifetime of infrastructure, while continuously evaluating and managing uncertainties and risks. This proposal is a joint project between the University of Cambridge and Imperial College London and comprises an integrated research program to evaluate and develop prototype WSN systems. The main objectives of this proposal are to bridge advances in modelling large-scale engineering infrastructure with advances in wireless sensor networks and to develop a low-cost smart sensing environment for monitoring ageing public infrastructure. Three application domains will be studied in detail: (i) monitoring water supply and sewer systems and (ii) monitoring tunnels and (iii) monitoring bridges. The complexity of the monitoring system requires the following research areas to be explored : sensor systems, wireless communications, autonomous systems, information management, programming and design tools, trust security and privacy, systems theory, human factors and social issues. Field trials will be carried out with London Underground Ltd., Thames Water, Highways Agency and Humber Bridge. Intel Corporation will support the project with hardware for the trials.