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Procedia Engineering 146 (2016) 303 309

8th International Cold Climate HVAC 2015 Conference, CCHVAC 2015

Review of Identification Methods for Indoor Pollutant Sources

Shui Yua,*, Lianjie Hea, Guohui Fenga
a

School of Municipal and Environmental Engineering, Shenyang Jianzhu University, 9 Hunnan Road, Shenyang 110168, China

Abstract

Source identification has been a challenging research topic in the area of indoor air quality which is an inverse
problem in physics and mathematics as the process is to find unknown causes from known consequences. This
paper studied a large number of research results of predecessors, and grouped the indoor pollutant
sources identification methods into direct methods, probability and statistics methods and optimization methods.
Although the indoor pollution source identification method has made great progress, but is still under the
experimental conditions, and the simulation process was greatly simplified. The future research on the inverse
problem of indoor pollutants should be more connected with the actual situation. More comprehensive species of
pollutants, more complex way that pollutants release, and greater variety of sources type should be carried on in
research. In addition, the development of more advanced methods to improve the identification rate is the priority.
2016
2016The
TheAuthors.
Authors.Published
Published
Elsevier

by by
Elsevier
Ltd.Ltd.
This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).
Peer-review under responsibility of the organizing committee of CCHVAC 2015.
Peer-review under responsibility of the organizing committee of CCHVAC 2015
Keywords: Inverse problem; Direct Methods; Probability and statistics methods; Optimization methods; PTR-MS.

1. Introduction
The control of indoor pollutants has been becoming an important tributary and research hot spot in the building
environment and related fields. The mostly used methods of pollution control are pollution source control, fresh air
systems and air purification[1]. If pollutants could be controlled at the source, the subsequent workload of
ventilation and air purification will be declined significantly. To prove effectiveness of pollutant source control, it
demands accurate and quick prediction of position and emission intensity of pollution source. However, to meet
above requirements, professionals have to approach pollution source to measure parameters precisely, even that are

* Corresponding author. Tel.: +0-000-000-0000 ; fax: +0-000-000-0000 .

E-mail address: yushui19832002@163.com

1877-7058 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license

(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).
Peer-review under responsibility of the organizing committee of CCHVAC 2015

doi:10.1016/j.proeng.2016.06.396

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Shui Yu et al. / Procedia Engineering 146 (2016) 303 309

toxic substances released by explosive containers, which always put professionals safety in risk and lead to low
distinguish efficiency of polluting character so as to reduce the response speed of the initiative pollution control. In
general, its necessary and urgent to develop a method which can distinguish potential pollutant sources by limited
remote data input sensors. Tracing pollution source information by data of sensors is a kind of inverse problems.
Throughout domestic and overseas research results, inverse problem theories have been widely applied in
underground water source, seismic origin, acoustic source, heat source, atmosphere environment and some other
research fields. Despite a late application in indoor air pollution sources, with accelerating attention to indoor air
quality, inverse problems have been developed rapidly in indoor pollution. The main characteristic of inverse
problems is ill-posedness, which means the solution does not necessarily exist. Even it exists, the solution may not
be unique, besides, it does not continuously depend on the changes of observing data[2]. As Alifanov[3] pointed out,
the numerical solution of inverse problems are unstable. As a result, the core issues is to find a proper way to
improve numerical stability in inverse problems solving process to obtain the only solution.

Nomenclature
QR
PR
GC/MS
PTR-MS
ACO
SA
GA
ANN
PSO

Quasi-reversible
Pseudo-reversible
Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectrometer
Proton Transfer Reaction- Mass Spectrometry
Ant Colony Optimization
Simulated Annealing
Genetic Algorithm
Artificial Neuro Network
Particle Swarm Optimization

2. Methods
For years scholars have made unremitting exploration and efforts to identify sources of pollution problems, and
developed some systematic methods. Rao et al.[4] summed up the source estimate approach to forward modeling
and backward modeling methods. Forward modeling methods, which describe the atmospheric transport from
sources to receptors, use forward-running transport and dispersion models or computational fluid dynamics models
which are run many times, and the resulting dispersion field is compared to observations from multiple sensors, e.g.,
Bayesian inference method. Forward methods aims at finding the relevant features of the source that make the
concentration difference between simulations and observations minimized. Backward modeling methods typically
use only one run in the reverse direction from the receptors, in order to determine the unknown upwind sources. Liu
and Zhai[5] studied various inverse modeling methods for indoor emission sources and summarized the methods
into three major categories: forward, backward, and probability inverse modeling methods. Under the assumed
sources conditions, the forward method carries out disseminated simulation of forward airflow and pollutant by error
text means. The backward methods start from the end state, and use negative time step in the simulation to get the
evolution of concentration and fluctuation history of sources. Probability methods focus on assessing the probability
associated with fixed events, for example, the probability of pollutants at some locations. In the probability method,
the source information is determined by maximize or minimize the objective function, and uncertainty analysis can
be carried out directly. Zhang[6] summarized the progress of the inverse modeling to identify the indoor pollution
sources, and research profile of inverse modeling in the field of heat transfer, water pollution and air pollution, then
grouped the research methods to identify indoor air sources into four categories, namely analytical method,
probability method, optimization method, and direct method. Chen[7] turned the localization research results of
leakage source into two categories: method based on probability and statistical theory and method based on
optimization theory. Method based on probability and statistical theory uses the prior information of unknown

Shui Yu et al. / Procedia Engineering 146 (2016) 303 309

parameters and the observed data to obtain the posterior probability distribution of parameters based on Bayes
theorem, then sampled the posterior distribution to obtain estimates of the unknown parameters. Method based on
optimization theory simulated the accident to investigate the compatibility of model calculation concentration and
the observed concentration, and optimized matching degree by updating parameters with a variety of optimization
methods.
On the basis of previous studies, this paper combined the latest research and divided the research methods of
indoor pollutant sources identification into three categories: direct methods, probability and statistics methods and
optimization methods. Comparison of three methods is shown in Table 1.
Table 1. Comparison of sources identification methods
Category

Typical methods

Reference

Principle

Direct methods

Quasi-reversible
method

Zhang and Chen(2007a)[8]

Pseudo-reversible
method

Zhang and Chen(2007b)[9]

This method takes the time step or flow

field of the propagation equations of
pollutants in inverted direction, thereby
reproducing the spread of pollutants
history.

Zhang and Li(2011)[10]

Zhang and Li(2012)[11]

Probability and
statistics
methods

Traditional probability
method

Sohn et al.(2002)[12]
Screedharan et al.(2006)[13]
Wang(2011)[14]

This method focuses on assessing the

probability associated with fixed events,
such as the probability of an event
occurring in the designated locations.

Pang et al.(2012)[15]
Wei et al.(2013)[16]

Optimization
methods

Adjoint probability
method

Liu and Zhai(2007)[17]

Statistical inductive
method

Capasso et al.(2008)[19]

Gradient based

Cai et al.(2012)[21]

optimization method

Zhang et al.(2013)[22]

Zhai and Liu(2012)[18]

Han et al.(2011)[20]

Cai et al.(2014)[23]

Intelligent
optimization

Vukovic et al.(2010)[24]
Bastani et al.(2012)[25]

This method assumes possible sources

are known, and investigates
The compatibility between calculated
concentration at sensor and the observed
concentration, then updates the
parameters by optimized algorithm to
make optimal matching.

method

3. Results
3.1. Direct methods
Direct methods, i.e. backward algorithm, is to control the time steps or flow field of the Control equation of
pollutant propagation in opposite direction, which could reproduce the spread history, and finally help to identify
the pollutant sources. In fact, controlling the parameters of the equations in opposite direction is a pathological
process which have no numerical stability, it is necessary to take some special strategies to enhance the numerical
stability. Regularization and stabilization are two common methods to enhance the numerical stability. The
comparison results from Skaggs and Kabala[26] show that stabilization method is much more efficient to calculate,
although the performance may be slightly worse than the regularization method. Existing research results[27] also
show that regularization method is only applicable to flow problems with a uniform constant speed. Therefore, the

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stabilization method was commonly used by adding a stable term directly into the pollutant governing equation.
The governing transport equation, for example, of Gaseous pollutants can be expressed as [9]:

w>I t @
w
>uiI t @  w

wt
wxi
wxi

* wI t 

 SI
U wxi

(1)

The left-hand side of the above equation is the pollutant concentration change rate, and the right-hand side of the
equation is the convection, diffusion, and source terms, respectively.
One method to add a stable term is replacing the second-order diffusion term in Equation 1 with a forth-order
term. Meanwhile, the nominal source at the sensor location is also required to be reflected in the equation, thus
equation 1 can be written as[9]:
2
2

w>I W @
w
>uiI W @  H w 2 w I 2W   SIG xG  xG0 G W  W 0 

wW
wxi
wxi wxi

(2)

Where H is the stabilization coefficient, x0 is the sensor location, W 0 (=t0) is the time when the peak
contaminant concentration is detected at the fixed sensor location. The last term on the right-hand side of Equation 2
is the nominal instantaneous source at the sensor location. This equation is called QR equation, and this stabilization
method to makes time reverse is called quasi-reversible method.
Unlike the QR method, there is another method solving the inverse transport problem by making the flow
backward by following equation:

w>I t @
w
>uicI t @  SIG xG  xG0 G t  t0 

wt
wxi

(3)

Where t is the time in ascending order(t0), but uic is a reversed velocity component whose direction is
opposite to ui . This equation is called PR equation, and this stabilization method is called pseudo-reversible method.
Zhang and Chen[9] adopted quasi-reversible and pseudo-reversible methods to solve the inverse problem of the
spread of gaseous pollutants, respectively. Then, Zhang and Li[11] also established quasi-reversible methods and
pseudo-reversible methods (through the establishment of an inverse Lagrangian model) to track the source of
atmospheric particulate pollutants. The results shows that both methods can well identify the sources. While the QR
method has slightly higher accuracy than the PR method, but requires more computing time, because the calculation
load of fourth-order term stability is very large.
3.2. Probability and statistics methods
Probability and statistics methods can be divided into traditional probabilistic method, adjoint probability method
and statistical inductive method. Based on Bayesian inference, the core of traditional probability method is to
quantify the likelihood of the existence of a pollutant source by using conditional probabilities. Sohn et al.[12] and
Sreedharan[13] both performed researches on sources inside a building by Bayesian probability, respectively. But
their calculation accuracy is relatively rough for the use of a multi-zone model. Pang et al.[15] proposed probabilitybased approach to locate unexpected sources. Adjoint probability method derives the probability location function
and probability trival time function which present the source information. Meanwhile, the method treats the sensor
which detected the pollutant as a kind of "pollutant source", then obtains the possibility that actual source exists at a
particular location by inverse calculation. Liu and Zhai[17] proposed a two-stage inverse modeling approach, which
combines multi-zone model with CFD model. The preliminary study confirmed that the adjoint probability method
is feasible for the indoor pollutants inverse modeling.

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The application of statistical inductive method on source identification field is very little. Capasso et al.[19] once
analyzed a large number of sample data by GC/MS, using statistical inductive method to identify the leakage source.
However, the concentration of pollutants of indoor environment is at a relatively low level, the sample must be
collected, concentrated extract and separated before using GC/MS, which makes the measurement process timeconsuming. In recent years, the PTR-MS method based high sensitivity mass spectrometry detection characteristics
has been widely used. Compared with the GC/MS technology, this method has the advantage of the measurement
speed, high sensitivity and without complicated sample processing. Han et al.[20] explored the feasibility that
applied PTR-MS technology to source identification and successfully identified various sources under the
experimental conditions.
3.3. Opitimization methods
Optimization methods assume that information of all possible sources is known, and then calculate the
concentration information by solving pollutant governing equation. At last, the matching degree between
each potential source of pollutant concentration and observed concentration can be obtained by optimization method,
i.e., the optimization of the objective function. Backward calculation procedure is aimed at looking for the best
match between concentration data of simulation transmission control equations and actual observation, then defining
the best match by objective function. In all the optimization algorithms, some of them establish the objective
function by using the observation data and the pollutants transport diffusion model. Meanwhile, the direction of
gradient descent in objective function are set as the direction of the target parameter updating. Thus, the above
methods can be classified into gradient optimization methods. When faced with particularly complex problems, the
solution of the first order or second order derivative to objective function will become extremely complex, which
makes this kind of optimization method limited and difficult to achieve fast and efficient solution. Hence,
optimization methods are often associated with structured method to be used to improve the resolution efficiency
[28].
In recent years, complicated combined optimization problems appear continuously in many fields, which cant be
solved in a reasonable amount of time by the traditional optimization method. Then, the intelligent optimization
algorithms has come up with a somewhat radical solution to such problems. The main idea of intelligent
optimization algorithms is: setting specific constraints, searching in the solution space composed by solving
coefficients, hoping to find an optimal solution which can achieve the desired accuracy. Classical algorithms
including ACO, SA, GA, ANN, PSO, et al., which are widely used and play an important role in the research of
finding sources such as stratum unknown source, groundwater pollution sources, heat conduction pollution source
and atmospheric environmental leakage source. Intelligent optimization algorithms is less used in the research of
Indoor pollution source identification. Vukovic et al.[24] established the neural network model based on Multiple
multi-zone simulation results by CONTAM, and detected the pollution sources of nine interior spaces. Bastani et
al.[25] also adopted artificial neural network combined with CONTAM, and carried out the identification of
pollution source location with finite sensor readings. But how to apply artificial neural network to a single room
with source identification still needs further study.

4. Discussion
Inverse problem of indoor pollutants sourcing research is currently in the stage of rapid development, but there
are still many shortcomings:
x Nowadays, most researches on indoor pollution source identification only stay in single source scenario, but in
fact the indoor pollution are generally a result of the combined action of multiple pollutants sources. The only
researches on multi-sources can only identify the location in one-dimensional or two-dimensional space, and the
accuracy is poor.

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x Current research on indoor pollutant source identification is not thorough yet. Although the simple location
identification can be basically achieved through the information detected by detector, the emission power and
initial emission time identification still lack effective strategies.
x Indoor pollutants species are complex including not only a large number of VOC, but also particulate aerosols
and biochemical contaminants. However, inverse problem research on aerosol particles and biological
contaminants tracing remains to be further studied.
x In recent years, the continuous development of intelligent optimization algorithms provides a powerful research
tool for all types of complex source identification problem. Though it was barely applied to the field of indoor
pollution source identification nowadays, but it can provide new methods for indoor source identification.
x The current researches on indoor pollution source identification basically assume the pollution source as a point
source. Supposing that the pollution source be divided into point source, linear source and plane source pollution
source, which will not only be closer to real situation, but also helpful to faster the sources separation and
identification.
x Achieving rapid identification is the main purpose of important pollution source identification, and also our
priority requirement in further research.
5. Conclusions
Indoor pollutant source tracing problem belongs to the category of inverse problem, inverse problem in the
numerical solution does not have stability. Therefore, in order to solve this problem, the key is to find a
suitable method to enhance the numerical stability of the solution of inverse problem. This paper studied a large
number of research results of predecessors, and grouped the indoor pollutant sources identification methods into
direct methods, probability and statistics methods and optimization methods. Although the indoor pollution source
identification method has made great progress, but is still under experimental conditions, and the simulation process
was greatly simplified. The future research on the inverse problem of indoor pollutants should be more connected
with the actual situation. More comprehensive species of pollutants, more complex way that pollutants release, and
greater variety of sources type should be carried on in research. In addition, the development of more advanced
methods to improve the identification rate is the priority.
Acknowledgements
This research was supported by National Natural Science Funds (51308353), Liaoning Natural Science Funds
(2014020072), project of College Innovation Team of Liaoning ProvinceLT2013013.
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