Environmental noise modeling within an open source GIS

1. Introduction The work consists in designing and building up a model of noise propagation caused by vehicular traffic in urban environment. Obviously the problem has already been deeply described in literature: the new approach we have studied and developed tries to give a simple model suitable to estimate the noise values and to simulate different scenarios due to a change in the traffic plan in medium or large areas (e.g. urban area of a middle city). Because of the complexity and the large amount of the geographical data involved (noise observations, roads, buildings), a set of functions has been implemented within the GRASS