A novel method to determine multiexposure priority indices tested for Pisa action plan

Abstract

The European directive 2002/49/EC requires noise maps as step before designing action plans. Due to economical constraints a priority scale of mitigation actions is needed and, for this purpose, the Italian legislation established a methodology based on the exceeding of the limits and the amount of population exposed to such exceeding. This paper proposes a new method, named Multi Annoyance Building Prioritisation Score (MABPS), aimed to take into account the annoyance due to the exposure from different sources (multiexposure). The proposed method is a modification of the Scottish Building Prioritisation Score (BPS), shortly described in the paper too. To test the MABPS method, the case study of strategic noise map of Pisa was considered. All the noise levels from airport, roads, railways and industries were calculated and limits and advantages of the method are discussed by comparing the MABPS index with the Italian and Scottish ones, also in the perspective of a standardized procedure. The results show significant differences between MABPS and the other methods, especially because the former considers a larger number of buildings to be included into the action plan and, at this stage, no weightings are applied to take account of the building use.