Finding Optimal Stations Using Euclidean Distance and Adjustable Surrounding Sphere

Air quality monitoring network (AQMN) plays an important role in air pollution management. However, setting up an initial network in a city often lacks necessary information such as historical pollution and geographical data, which makes it challenging to establish an effective network. Meanwhile, cities with an existing one do not adequately represent spatial coverage of air pollution issues or face rapid urbanization where additional stations are needed. To resolve the two cases, we propose four methods for finding stations and constructing a network using Euclidean distance and the k-nearest neighbor algorithm, consisting of Euclidean Distance (ED), Fixed Surrounding Sphere (FSS), Euclidean Distance + Fixed Surrounding Sphere (ED + FSS), and Euclidean Distance + Adjustable Surrounding Sphere (ED + ASS). We introduce and apply a coverage percentage and weighted coverage degree for evaluating the results from our proposed methods. Our experiment result shows that ED + ASS is better than other methods for finding stations to enhance spatial coverage. In the case of setting up the initial networks, coverage percentages are improved up to 22%, 37%, and 56% compared with the existing network, and adding a station in the existing one improved up by 34%, 130%, and 39%, in Sejong, Bonn, and Bangkok cities, respectively. Our method depicts acceptable results and will be implemented as a guide for establishing a new network and can be a tool for improving spatial coverage of the existing network for future expansions in air monitoring.