Caused by various studies underlining the negative effects of noise exposure and insufficient sound quality within workspaces, this topic receives a growing public attention. These negative impacts include stress symptoms, cardiovascular problems, communication problems and a reduced productivity. In contrary to environmental noise problems caused by infrastructure (aircraft noise, road noise etc.), the responsibility of noise problems within work spaces is distributed among millions of different companies which all require individual solutions. In order to tackle this problem, the German Ministry of Commerce commissioned a project with the objective to develop a procedure to efficiently assess the acoustical situation within workspaces and as a second step to enable the analysis of different measures for improvement. The modeling of complex machinery, speaker systems or people as a sound source must be enabled in order to meet the given objective. At the same time the process should facilitate the comparison of various measures for noise reduction like screens, absorbing baffle ceilings or different workshop layouts. Furthermore and in order to enable a wide base of usage, this procedure needs to be accurate and at the same time easy to apply. This paper provides an overview of research problems, possible solutions and existing techniques.
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