RIAT+

Summary

RIAT+ is a regional Integrated Assessment Modelling tool developed during the OPERA project (LIFE09 ENV/IT/000092). It has been designed to help regional decision makers to select optimal air pollution reduction policies that will improve the air quality at minimum costs.

The system incorporates explicitly the specific features of the area of interest with regional input data-set for the:

• precursor emissions of local and surrounding sources;
• abatement measures described per activity sector and technology with information on application rates, emission removal efficiency factor and cost;
• effect of meteorology and prevailing chemical regimes through the use of site specific source-receptor (S/R) functions.

The tool allows two possible decision pathways: scenario analysis and optimization.

The main outputs from RIAT+ are a summary of emission reductions on the domain, a table of the application rates for the different measures, maps of a set of relevant air quality indexes (AQIs) and, for the optimisation pathway, the Pareto Curve providing the efficient solutions of a specific AQI ranked by costs.

The S/R model is used, internally, to link emissions to an AQI. The S/R model can be as simple as a linear relationship, or as complex as a chemical transport model. To limit the computational time, RIAT+ currently uses a nonlinear relations identified by means of Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs), tuned to replicate the results of a limited set of simulations performed by the users with deterministic air quality model calibrated on the specific site.