Integrating Meteorological Data with Artificial Intelligence for Air Quality Prediction on Construction Sites

Air pollution, largely caused by activities in the construction sites, poses serious health and environmental risks to workers and people living nearby. This study focuses on predicting the concentrations of six major pollutants, i.e. PM2.5, PM10, NO2, CO, SO2, and O3. We train a Long Short-Term Memory network (LSTM) on each pollutant to forecast its levels twelve hours in advance. A window generator is used to map data into sequences, enabling the model to capture temporal patterns effectively. Extensive data pre-processing ensures accuracy, including handling missing values and transforming categorical variables. Specifically, the analysis of the pollutants is composed by the following steps: i) preparing the data, ii) building and training the model, iii) evaluating the model performance in terms of Root Mean Square Error (RMSE). We prove that LSTM performs outstandingly over other models, i.e. Random Forest and Artificial Neural Network. The obtained RMSE values ensure credibility and reliability of LSTM in air quality predictions. This predictive framework offers a practical approach for construction sites to manage air pollution and mitigate health and environmental impacts proactively.