Challenges for air pollution monitoring: A cyber-physical social systems approach

Air pollution control plays a pivotal role today in urban contexts, as both citizens and public administrators are increasingly sensitive about it. Traditional air pollution sensing is performed and managed by public institutions with professional and expensive equipment, thus exhibiting a series of inherent limitations such as isolated monitoring campaigns, data heterogeneity, inconsistency and incompleteness, limited access to sensed data. Cyber-Physical-Social Systems (CPSS) promise to be a considerable step forward, as they promote the systematic involvement of citizens in monitoring processes and the provisioning of proactive services to end users. However, several elements hinders such a model. In this paper, we will discuss the challenges of applying cyber-physical paradigm to air pollution monitoring in smart cities, exemplifying the issues on the Italian case study and then we will show how CPSS will go over them and outline novel research directions.