Special Issue "Urban Noise Analysis and Management in Smart Cities"

A special issue of Sustainability (ISSN 2071-1050). This special issue belongs to the section "Sustainable Urban and Rural Development".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 31 December 2021.

Special Issue Editors

Dr. Juan Miguel Navarro
E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Research Group in Advanced Telecommunications (GRITA), Universidad Católica de Murcia (UCAM), 30107 Guadalupe, Spain
Interests: room acoustic simulation; acoustics; sound processing; Internet of Things; smart cities; environmental acoustics; diffusion equation model
Dr. Jaume Segura-Garcia
E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Computer Science, ETSE, Universitat de València, 46100 Burjassot, Valencia, Spain
Interests: IoT; WSN; Smart Cities; signal processing; artificial intelligence
Special Issues and Collections in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

In recent years, designers, architects, engineers and city managers have paid increasing attention to the Smart City paradigm. Smart Cities are an innovation in urban planning, based on the continuous learning of urban developments, exploiting the potential of technology and promoting sustainability.

Along with the concept of Smart Cities, the remote monitoring of environmental parameters is increasing their presence in society, being one of the scientific fields with a great evolution over the last decade. This has led to the emergence of new strategies and tools for the analysis and the management of environmental pollution, with the help of advances in sensors, computing and communications technologies. 

Among all the environmental factors, noise pollution is one of the main concerns of modern cities because of its effects on the quality of life, health and livability of cities. Current research has focused on the definition of acoustic indices to evaluate urban sound environment, together with methods and tools to measure, analyze and predict them, improving the management models and integrating them in the Smart City platform. Within this common space, some related topics can be highlighted:

  • Definition and analysis of urban acoustic indices.
  • Measurement and evaluation of sound environment in urban spaces.
  • Wireless acoustic sensor network design and deployment.
  • Integration of noise monitoring systems with Smart City platform and other services.
  • Management systems for noise pollution in cities.
  • Big data models and implementations for noise levels analysis and smart management.
  • Statistical and machine learning techniques to analyze and to predict noise pollution in cities.
  • Next generation networks integration with Smart City infrastructures (including SDN, Edge and Cloud computing)

This Special Issue aims at enlarging this knowledge, and welcomes original research papers, case studies, critical perspectives and viewpoint articles on, but not limited to, the above subjects.

Dr. Juan Miguel Navarro
Dr. Jaume Segura-Garcia
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All papers will be peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1900 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • acoustic environment
  • noise evaluation and analysis
  • Smart City
  • noise pollution management
  • wireless acoustic sensor network
  • Internet of Things
  • big data
  • NGN
  • machine learning

Published Papers (2 papers)

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Research

Article
Effects of Evocative Audio-Visual Installations on the Restorativeness in Urban Parks
Sustainability 2021, 13(15), 8328; https://doi.org/10.3390/su13158328 - 26 Jul 2021
Viewed by 468
Abstract
Road traffic noise is responsible for several negative health effects for citizens in modern cities. Inside urban parks, which citizens use for social inclusion and cohesion, psychological and physical restoration, and physical activities, road traffic noise may significantly reduce the potential of these [...] Read more.
Road traffic noise is responsible for several negative health effects for citizens in modern cities. Inside urban parks, which citizens use for social inclusion and cohesion, psychological and physical restoration, and physical activities, road traffic noise may significantly reduce the potential of these places to induce or enhance well-being. Although access restriction schemes and screens could be effective solutions to limit noise inside urban park areas, preserving their potential regenerative role may engender mobility, social, aesthetic, and architectural issues. Due to the positive effects that natural elements and water sounds can have on human perception, and based on the previous findings of the beneficial effects of audio-visual installations, this paper investigates the possibility of using audio-visual installations that simply evoke some natural features to improve the restoration of individuals inside urban parks. The study has been carried out using immersive virtual environments in two different experimental laboratory sessions in Hong Kong (China) and Aversa (Italy). The results showed that the positive effects provided by evocative installations were similar to those provided by traditional installations. Furthermore, the effects on the restoration increased as the installations became larger and included enveloping shapes. Furthermore, we found that the amount of evocative water installations’ material was responsible for changes in restoration. In contrast, the Chinese groups were less influenced by these installations. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Urban Noise Analysis and Management in Smart Cities)
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Article
Multilevel Annoyance Modelling of Short Environmental Sound Recordings
Sustainability 2021, 13(11), 5779; https://doi.org/10.3390/su13115779 - 21 May 2021
Viewed by 452
Abstract
The recent development and deployment of Wireless Acoustic Sensor Networks (WASN) present new ways to address urban acoustic challenges in a smart city context. A focus on improving quality of life forms the core of smart-city design paradigms and cannot be limited to [...] Read more.
The recent development and deployment of Wireless Acoustic Sensor Networks (WASN) present new ways to address urban acoustic challenges in a smart city context. A focus on improving quality of life forms the core of smart-city design paradigms and cannot be limited to simply measuring objective environmental factors, but should also consider the perceptual, psychological and health impacts on citizens. This study therefore makes use of short (1–2.7 s) recordings sourced from a WASN in Milan which were grouped into various environmental sound source types and given an annoyance rating via an online survey with N=100 participants. A multilevel psychoacoustic model was found to achieve an overall R2=0.64 which incorporates Sharpness as a fixed effect regardless of the sound source type and Roughness, Impulsiveness and Tonality as random effects whose coefficients vary depending on the sound source. These results present a promising step toward implementing an on-sensor annoyance model which incorporates psychoacoustic features and sound source type, and is ultimately not dependent on sound level. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Urban Noise Analysis and Management in Smart Cities)
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Planned Papers

The below list represents only planned manuscripts. Some of these manuscripts have not been received by the Editorial Office yet. Papers submitted to MDPI journals are subject to peer-review.

Title: Effects of use of evocative water installations on the restorativeness in urban parks
Authors: Massimiliano Masullo; Luigi Maffei
Affiliation: Università degli Studi della Campania Luigi Vanvitelli, Naples, Italy
Abstract: Citizens and visitors use urban parks of modern cities for several reasons: for social inclusion and cohesion, but more and more for their psychological and physical restoration. These spaces are often threatened by the surrounding road traffic noise (and air) pollutant emissions that reduce their potentialities. The noise mitigation strategies allowed for these spaced are very limited and concern mainly the use of traffic Access Restriction Schemes or of acoustic screens. However, these solutions may cause several economic, social, safety, aesthetic and architectural impacts. It is interesting to investigate the possibility of using an alternative mitigation strategy that, rather than physically, reduce the noise, is based on the psychological effects of some moderating factors. Building on the positive findings that natural elements and water sounds can have on human perception, this paper aims to assess the possibility of using artificial audio-visual installations that evoke the natural features to stimulate people restoration. The study has been implemented in two experimental sessions that using immersive virtual environments to measure the Restorativeness of individuals: 1) to a different type of evocative water installations, and 2) to a different amount of the material of the evocative water installation. Both the sessions were repeated in Italy and in China also to highlight the intercultural differences. Results showed that evocative installation can improve some components of the Restorativeness and that at least 60% of the material should cover the installations. However, inter-cultural differences emerged.”

Title: Sound Source Based Annoyance Modelling for a Wireless Acoustic Sensor Network
Authors: Ferran Orga; Andrew Mitchell; Marc Freixes; Francesco Aletta; Rosa Ma Alsina-Pagès; Maria Foraster
Affiliation: GTM - La Salle Universitat Ramon Llull
Abstract: The recent development and deployment of Wireless Acoustic Sensor Networks (WASN) presents new possibilities for addressing urban acoustic challenges in a smart city context. A focus on improving quality of life forms the core of smart-city design paradigms and cannot be limited to measuring objective environmental factors, but should also consider the perceptual, psychological and health impacts on citizens. This study therefore makes use of short (1-2.7 s) recordings sourced from a WASN in Milan which were grouped into various environmental sound source types and given an annoyance rating via an online survey with N=100 participants. A multilevel psychoacoustic model is found to achieve an overall R2=0.64 which incorporates Sharpness as a fixed effect independent of the sound source type and Roughness, Impulsiveness and Tonality as random effects whose coefficients vary depending on the sound source. These results present a promising step toward implementing an on-sensor annoyance model which incorporates psychoacoustic features and sound source type, and is ultimately not dependent on sound level.

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