
physical world and send the corresponding
information to the cloud tier through data/remote
transfer units (D/RTUs) and smart communication
gateways, through different wireless access
networks. After analyzing the data sent by the
sensor & actuator tier, the cloud tier makes
appropriate decisions, generates suitable
recommendations for users, and sends the necessary
configuration information and/or commands to the
controllers, actuators, guards, etc., located in the
sensor & actuator tier, for enforcing the required
actions needed for the realization of the imposed
changes in the physical world.
Each AQI monitoring station includes a variety
of pollution sensors connected with an ultra-low-
power geo-grid identified D/RTU. Sensors
communicate periodically (usually every 5 minutes)
with the corresponding D/RTU. Each D/RTU sends
the collected air-quality data, according to the
scheduling algorithm used, to the cloud tier of
EMULSION, which employs a distributed Redis
database, a Hadoop cluster [6], and a web-based
Geographic Information System (GIS) [7]. The
cloud tier provides scaled GUI services for the
mobile and desktop client applications’ requests.
This paper demonstrates the use of the developed
pilot AQI monitoring system for the generation of
healthy routes for outdoor activity planning by
users. The difference between the presented work
with those published in the literature is that most of
the published research suggests a specific
application that does some specific things. In
contrast, we offer here a more generic architecture
that is technology-independent (i.e., w.r.t. hardware,
operating system, programming language) and
distributed in nature (i.e., hosted on multiple
machines), which provides an opportunity for
extending it almost without a limit. A clear
explanation of the healthy route calculation is
provided in the paper, along with a concrete
implementation in the form of a web-based
application, demonstrating the way it works in
reality. The usefulness of the presented study relates
to the possible integration of the proposed method
for healthy route generation into the existing
navigation systems and applications alike.
2 Related Work
In general, there are two primary types of methods
for route cost calculation, [3], i.e., using: (1) static
cost of paths serving as an input to the standard
Dijkstra algorithm [8]; and (2) dynamic cost of
paths, varying over space and time, such as the AQI
value and the travel time which depends on the path
infrastructure’s condition and traffic flow. As more
advanced, multiple methods of the second type have
been proposed, e.g., based on adaptive decision
rules [9], genetic algorithms [10], [11], [12],
probabilistic models [13], uncertainty [14], etc.
Previous studies on “healthy route” generation
can be divided into two main groups [2], i.e., using:
(1) monitoring stations to measure pollutant
exposure on various types of roads, followed by
classification of roads as healthy or unhealthy, based
on the exposure levels; and (2) pollution distribution
data obtained by different means, e.g., by a land use
regression (LUR) [15], [16], an operational street
pollution model (OSPM) [17], an interpolation
method, [3], [18], etc., as an input to the (dynamic)
Dijkstra algorithm for generating healthy routes
[19], using different indicators (traffic volume, AQI,
potential pollutant dose taken, etc.) as road network
weights. If taking full advantage of modern
pollutant retrieval technologies, the trustworthiness
of the generated healthy routes could be
significantly increased. For this, [2] proposes a
short-distance healthy route planning approach,
utilizing fine spatial resolution images, and
meteorological and socioeconomic data to retrieve
the spatial distribution of PM2.5 concentration in
hourly intervals via a back-propagation neural
network. The effectiveness of the approach is
verified by comparing the PM2.5 potential dose
reduction rate between the generated healthy route
and the shortest route, reaching up to 20% reduction
in some cases. As an important factor affecting the
AQI values, PM2.5 concentration can be used also
to predict the AQI, [3].
By utilizing an interpolation method from the
second group, the current paper is focused on the
‘least air pollution exposure’ aspect of the “healthy
route”, computed in near real-time by applying the
dynamic Dijkstra algorithm, whereby the potential
exposure rate is calculated based on the AQI values,
whereby the desired values of the main air
pollutants (PM2.5, PM10, O3, CO, SO2, NO2) serve
as upper boundaries for reducing the number of
possible routes.
3 Utilized Data
3.1 Permanent Data
This type of data rarely or never changes. The open
data of the OpenStreetMap [20] are used as map
data for the study area, shown in Figure 1. This is a
rectangular area enclosed between the GPS
coordinates (36.846000/114.345000) and
(37.655772/115.684369) with a total coverage of
WSEAS TRANSACTIONS on INFORMATION SCIENCE and APPLICATIONS
DOI: 10.37394/23209.2024.21.52
Lazar Pendov, Zhanlin Ji, Ivan Ganchev