LIFE Vía de la Plata: Air Quality Monitoring through AI and Big Data

The LIFE Vía de la Plata project seeks to create solutions to climate change and to promote energy efficiency, in order to turn Salamanca into a sustainable, green and safe city. The main objectives focus on climate change adaptation strategies, creation of green infrastructure, ecosystem services, application of Big Data, Artificial Intelligence and IoT, as well as citizen participation.

A project in which the BISITE Research Group of the University of Salamanca participates, which contemplates monitoring with Ecosystem Services Control and Monitoring stations, based on sensors, IoT, Cloud Computing and Artificial Intelligence. The obtained parameters will be processed by Big Data programs in order to better plan and anticipate eventual scenarios which will help mitigate climate change in the city.

Current status of the project and next steps

Bisite's collaboration in the LIFE Vía de la Plata project stems from the need to use the capabilities of Artificial Intelligence to handle data from large data warehouses, Big Data.

Thanks to techniques such as Machine Learning and Deep Learning applied with tools such as Deep Intelligence, all the necessary knowledge is extracted from the data collected by the project to establish a strategy that will ultimately improve the quality of life of citizens and tourists in the city of Salamanca in areas near the Vía de la Plata.

Overview of Data Distribution over Time

So far, at Bisite, the main task has been the ingestion of the different data sources that make up the project, integrating very diverse sources from different origins such as air quality monitoring stations of the Junta de Castilla y León, data from the institutional repository of the University of Salamanca or data from the Sentinel 2 space mission.

Wind direction

The graph on the right shows the weekly average wind direction, considering the different stations separately,

The middle graph shows the distribution of wind speed and wind direction; the yellow columns represent wind direction, and the red line indicates wind speed.

The right graph indicates the distribution of wind degree over time; the blue graph shows daily values, the red graph shows monthly mean values, and the purple graph shows the annual mean distribution.

The new path on which the alliance between the research group and the rest of the project partners is embarking is focused on obtaining data from environmental monitoring stations, which will have sensors capable of collecting a series of environmental parameters, and which will complement the rest of the sources previously obtained.

The LIFE Vía de la Plata project (LIFE19 CCA/ES/001188) has received co-financing from the LIFE programme of the European Commission.