An urban noise management system integrated into a geographical information system

Big and small administrations are more and more interested in the use of Geographical Information System (GIS) for both urban and territorial planning. In a previous research the GIS system was used as support to build a simplified acoustic model to determine the urban noise levels close to the receiver positions and to define the critical areas where the exceeding of the limits occurred. In another research, a procedure was developed in the GIS system to determine what kind of noise reduction interventions were effective and suitable to be assigned in the critical areas. In this research a new procedure was integrated in the GIS system. The procedure was able to assign a priority index to each suitable intervention previously determined. The procedure was defined according to the Italian directives, in particular, the Tuscany Region directive. The new procedure integrated in the GIS system proved to be a valid supporting tool for the decisions of the territory's administration, as it allowed them to know the order in which to realize all the interventions to perform in a certain area.