A Mobile Sensing System for Urban P M 2.5 Monitoring with Adaptive Resolution

This paper develops a mobile sensing system, the first system used in adaptive resolution urban air quality monitoring. In this system, we employ several taxis as sensor carries to collect original P M 2.5 data and collect a variety of datasets, including meteorological data, traffic status data, and geographical data in the city. This paper also presents a novel method AG-PCEM (Adaptive Grid-Probabilistic Concentration Estimation Method) to infer the P M 2.5 concentration for undetected grids using dynamic adaptive grids. We gradually collect the measurements throughout a year using a prototype system in Xiasha District of Hangzhou City, China. Experimental data has verified that the proposed system can achieve good performance in terms of computational cost and accuracy. The computational cost of AG-PCEM is reduced by about 40.2% compared with a static grid method PCEM under the condition of reaching the close accuracy, and the accuracy of AG-PCEM is far superior as widely used artificial neural network (ANN) and Gaussian process (GP), enhanced by 38.8% and 14.6%, respectively. The system can be expanded to wide-range air quality monitor by adjusting the initial grid resolution, and our findings can tell citizens actual air quality and help official management find pollution sources.