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Airly

A unified platform for air quality data to aid governments.

Industry:

SmartCity

Technologies:

EXPERTISE

Design

Deliverables

UX, UI

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Brief

Airly Public is a company that delivers information about air quality not only in Poland and Europe but all over the world. Its mission is to support local communities in the fight to improve air quality. Thanks to the advanced sensors that the system is equipped with, it enables the gathering and processing of various types of information that often are of utmost importance when it comes to making relevant decisions and changes in local government institutions.

The client asked us for help in designing and developing a panel monitoring air quality. The system is responsible for the storage, filtration, aggregation, and presentation of data from different sensors for the area of the capital city of Warsaw.

The Challenge

The most challenging part of this project was the enormous amount of data that we had to process. What is more, the data came from different vendors in various formats, which made our task even more difficult than we expected. A huge part of our job was structuring and mapping the data for a common base. The efficient download of archival documentation records was also a complicated operation and another challenge for us. Due to the specificity of external APIs, the number of requests we had to make to retrieve data from previous months (before the kick-off production version) was around 100,000. It would be a very time-consuming task, that’s why we had to redesign the whole process of downloading the data and do it asynchronously. We divided one month period of time into 45-sec intervals. We collected them and saved them in the base in form of batches.

“The greatest value of the project is the consciousness of delivering an IT system that contributes to improving the quality of the environment that we live in. Thanks to the panel we have developed, we can identify new sources of pollution and react faster than ever before.”

Szymon Drożdżewicz
Project Manager at Applover

Development time

Technological Solution

One of the main assumptions of the project was to process the measurement data from the Airly sensors and other data providers. The parameters included there were as follows:

air temperature
atmospheric pressure
relative air humidity
dust concentration (PM2.5, PM1, PM10)
nitrogen dioxide & ozone concentration

For the backend side of the project, we choose the Ruby language with the use of the Ruby on Rails framework. Additionally, we decided on PostgreSQL for data storage, and also the Redis technology. The final result of the whole project is a panel that enables:

configuring frequencies of data downloads,
saving data in the PostgreSQL in a unified standard,
data analysis (for example aggregation of data from a given time, data filtration, finding the maximum values among others in the same period, etc.),
providing access to historical data,
providing access to the visual panel with the summary of the efficiency of the whole system,
viewing the status of Airly sensors.

Technological solution

The Outcome

The greatest value of the project is the consciousness of delivering an IT system that contributes to improving the quality of the environment that we live in. Thanks to the panel we’ve developed, now we’re able to identify new sources of pollution and react to them faster than ever before. Today we can be proud of ourselves for being a software provider of an app that aggregates great amounts of data about dust, temperature, pressure, and air humidity thanks to its stable operation. Despite many challenges during the project, the results are satisfactory both for our client and for us. And above all – for the environment!