Plenary Lecture
Physical and Mathematical Modelling in Road Traffic Noise Assessment: Advances and Challenges
Professor Claudio Guarnaccia
Department of Civil Engineering
University of Salerno
Italy
E-mail: cguarnaccia@unisa.it
Abstract: The possibility to apply advanced mathematical and physical models in Acoustics is largely investigated in the scientific literature. In particular, the most relevant problem in urban areas is the noise produced by road traffic flow. Its effects on human health are generally recognized as dangerous both for auditory and non-auditory consequences. For this reason, assessing noise is particularly important and needs specific models and methods according to the conditions of the area under study. A general approach to noise prediction cannot be easily drawn. In fact, the commonly used statistical models for RTN prediction are usually obtained with a fit on experimental field measurements, thus are barely applicable in context much different from the one in which they have been tuned. This important shortcoming will open the way to discuss the need for advanced modelling in RTN prediction. Different techniques will be presented, such as Cellular Automata, Montecarlo methods, Traffic Theory, regression methods, etc.. Time Series Analysis methods will be presented in details, showing as the detection of trend and seasonal components in some RTN datasets can give a powerful method to predict noise levels in various time ranges.
Brief Biography of the Speaker: Prof. Dr. Claudio Guarnaccia is temporary Professor of Physics at the Civil Engineering Department and post-doc researcher in Applied Physics at the Industrial Engineering Department of the University of Salerno. He graduated in 2004 and he took the PhD in 2008 in Nuclear Physics, at the University of Salerno, after a period spent at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research), in Geneva (Switzerland). Since 2005 he had teaching assistance activities at the Engineering Faculty of University of Salerno. His research interests are focused on the application of the modern Physics methods to engineering, environmental and bio-mathematical problems, in the "Applied Physics" research group headed by Prof. Joseph Quartieri. He is author of about 100 papers in international journals and conference proceedings, and was invited for several plenary and keynote lectures in various institutes and conferences. He is editor-in-chief of the “International Journal of Education and Information Technologies”, associate editor and/or reviewer of several international journals. He has been chair or member of the committees of a large number of conferences. He is “main researcher” in the “Modelling and Simulation” research group of WSEAS and has several research collaborations with national and international scholars and institutes. He is member of the Italian Association of Acoustics (AIA), the International Commission for the Occupational Health (ICOH), the World Scientific and Engineering Academy and Society (WSEAS), and other international research communities and organizations.