Environmental urban noise and the assessment of environmental impacts and opportunities with agent-based models

Environmental noise is an issue of concern in urban environments. Strategic noise mapping based on numerical models provides a visualization and quantification of environmental noise conditions with the aim of identifying individuals living in areas with excessive noise and designating noise protected areas, commonly referred to as quiet areas. The noise assessment method adopted by the European Environmental Noise Directive has three main limitations: the location of individuals is static, exposure is estimated based on long-term noise doses, and the socio-economic assessment of affected groups is not systematized. Therefore, agent-based models represent a methodological improvement to promote a detailed spatio-temporal study of the impact of excessive noise levels on the population and its accessibility to quiet areas. These large-scale models simulate the everyday mobility of each individual of a population. This article utilizes an agent-based, open source, open data framework applied to the Lyon metropolitan area to jointly analyze the impacts and opportunities related to environmental noise. The flexibility of the approach, with the potential for analysis according to different times of day, regions of the city, activity contexts and specific subpopulations, is confronted with the challenges of modeling at the scale of the individual.