A Model of Public Announcement System’s Dynamics Control in Smart City Environments

Ante Grgat,Ivan Djurek,Mia Suhanek

doi:10.11648/j.ajese.20190304.17

Abstract

Nowadays, each individual is exposed to noise on a daily basis. Long exposure to noise pollution can be manifested through several health concerns such as bad mood, fatigue, insomnia, headache and loss of concentration, which can then cause reduced work ability and finally permanent hearing impairment. When considering urban areas, the most common type of noise source is traffic. Public announcement system are a vital and much needed part of every urban area and thus it should be constructed in a way that it delivers relevant information in a clear and understandable way while not disturbing the residents. Therefore, this paper proposes a model of public announcement system in urban places which aims to reduce unexpected and sudden loudness changes. The system is envisaged for public places, such as open bus stations surrounded with residential and commercial buildings. Several studies have shown that the residents of these buildings find sudden announcements very annoying and disturbing. The goal of this research is to reduce the sound level while retaining the principal loudness level. The study has shown that with the appropriate signal processing which includes a compressor and a limiter, these types of announcements can be made less annoying and disturbing for urban residents.

Highlights

Noise pollution is a “hot” topic today and each individual is exposed to noise on a daily basis
Long exposure to noise pollution can be displayed as a bad mood, fatigue, insomnia, headache and loss of concentration, which can cause reduced work ability and permanent hearing impairment [1,2,3]
In this paper we have proposed a model for public announcement systems installed in public places near residential buildings

Summary

Introduction

Noise pollution is a “hot” topic today and each individual is exposed to noise on a daily basis. This paper proposes a model for public announcement (PA) system’s noise control in urban areas based on distributed microphones Signals from these microphones are used as sensing signals for loudness control of public announcement systems, for example at open or semi-open bus stations. Public announcement systems, used for announcing departure and arrival of buses, include spoken announcements after an initial signal tone These announcements are not constant and, from the residents’ point of view, appear randomly, and are often perceived as unexpected and sudden loudness changes. The goal is to adjust the level of the PA system in the bus station in a way that there are no sudden loudness changes, or at least that the level difference of these changes when compared to the average noise level is as low as possible. For signal analysis we used the Total Distraction Coefficient (TDC) which measures how sudden changes in signal are different to average signal level [8]

The Proposed Model

Conclusion