Noise Mapping, Noise Exposure Calculation and Action Planning compliant with EU Directive 2002/49/EC for major agglomerations (including industrial sites and ports), major roads and railways and major airports

IMMI fully supports the requirements of Directive 2002/49/EC for interim computation methods and national computation methods. All 4 interim computation methods including the adaptations described in Recommendation 2003/613/EC are available in IMMI. In total, in IMMI more than 20 national computation methods are availbale.

According to Directive 2002/49/EC the following calculation methods are recommended:

• NMPB/XP S 31-133 + Guide du Bruit (1980) - interim computation method for road traffic noise
• SRM II - interim computation method for railway noise
• ISO 9613-2 - interim computation methods for industrial noise
• ECAC.CEAC Doc. 29 (1997) with segmentation technique - interim computation method for aircraft noise
• Furthermore, Member States may use their own national computation methods. In that case equivalence with the interim methods must be shown.

IMMI calculates all four noise indicators simultaneously:  L_Day, L_Evening, L_Night and L_DEN. The grid cell size may be defined by the user. Typically it would be 10 m by 10 m. The calculation heigth is 4 m above the ground compliant with the requirements of the Directive. In addition, the height of 1,5 m that is also referenced in the Directive or any other height that may be requested by your national transposition can be defined by the user.

Typically, in IMMI the noise indicators are calculated separately for each type of noise source. Furthermore, IMMI enables the user to calculate global noise level maps (i.e. by energetic addition of the the noise maps calculated for each source separately).

Distributed processing on many networked PCs or multi-core computers (or a mixture of both) of large-scale noise maps is possible with the AUDINOM feature of IMMI.

IMMI features all requested noise exposure calculations of land-size area, dwellings and population.

The basis for the calculation of the land-area exposed to certain noise level bands is the startegic noise map and the definition of the noise exposure bands according to ANNEX VI of the Directive.

In IMMI each building can carry a series of attributes such as non residential, residential, school, hospital and kindergarten. The "residential" attribute identifies buildings for which both the number of people and the number of dwellings exposed to certain noise levels are calculated. The attributes school, hospital and kindergarten identify sensitive buildings. For these attributes, the number of buildings per noise level band is counted.

The number of people exposed to noise is determined by means of façade level calculations on residential buildings. The number of inhabitants can be assigned to each individual building by means of any of the following methods:

• direct input 
• import of existing digital data (see here for data import filters)
• statistical approximation on the basis of gross living area per inhabitant, building volume and number of storeys
• calculated from the population density of a land-use area or statistical sectors

2 methods to assess the number of people exposed to noise are available:

• proportional exposure: proportional attribution of the number of inhabitants of a given building to each façade level point.
• highest level exposure: in compliance with Directive 2002/49/EC all inhabitants of a building are assigned to the level of the most exposed façade.

Further information can be found here Feature: façade level calculation.