A GIS-based Approach to Automating the Collection of Geospatial Road Network Data

This article describes how air pollution dispersion models require the geospatial data of modeled road network centerlines to model the spatial dispersion of traffic air pollution emissions. This data represents the geographical coordinates of the centerline vertices of the road network in the air pollution model application area. The manual collection of this data is very labor intensive and prone to human errors, particularly in the case of dense road networks. Some well-developed air pollution models allow the digitization of modeled road network centerlines on a digital map. However, this proved to be a laborious process due to the large number of roads, the constraints of air pollution models on distance between consecutive road centerline vehicles, and the digitization limitations of the link between these models and geographic information systems (GIS) systems. Using a specific area with a dense road network in the United Kingdom (UK) city of Nottingham as a case study, this article describes how research has been undertaken to develop, and implement by computer programming, computer algorithms to automate the collection and processing of geospatial road network data without any digitization. This also introduced the concept of Level of Details (LOD) of modeled road networks to the science of air pollution dispersion modeling.