Air quality management is one of the most important sustainability goals in the era of Industry 5.0. The magnitude of air pollution and impact of drastic pollutants increase day by day despite the significant efforts of the environmental enthusiasts and researchers. The role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in determining the Air Quality Index (AQI) is significant with reasonable accuracy of classification achieved. The proposed model is a multi-class problem, that classifies the AQI into six different classes. Various ML models such as Decision Tree (DT), Random Forest (RF), Adaptive Boosting (AdaBoost), Gradient Boosting(GB), Logistic Regression (LR). The RF provided reliable performance metrics for AQI category prediction, achieving an accuracy and Precision of 0.99. This model is selected for the implementation of Explainable AI (XAI) models such as Local Interpretable Model Agonistic Explainer (LIME) for explanation using the local surrogacy plots and SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) explainer for the global surrogacy plots. The Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) can generate synthetic data, which addresses critical issues such as missing data, class imbalance, noise, and redundant data. The performance the GAN shows optimized performance in classification of the AQI data with accuracy closer to 100 %. This is mainly due to the synthetic data generated by the GAN which enhances the performance of the classification. The proposed work integrates the efforts of the GAN-AI-XAI that enhances the performance, reliability, trustworthiness and robustness of the AQI classification model.

Air Pollution is a critical environmental issue affecting public health, climate, and ecosystems. However, accurately predicting and classifying Air Quality Index (AQI) levels across different regions remains a challenging task due to the complex nature of air pollution patterns. Conventional and ensemble ML and DL models often fail to capture the physical laws goverming the air pollution, which leads to inaccurate predictions. This study addresses these issues by introducing an approach that employs Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINN) with Explainable AI (XAI) techniques for AQI classification (AirSense-X). The proposed approach utilizes PINN for regression, along with mapping for classification and XAI for interpretation. PINN ensures that the model learns from physical laws governing air quality rather than relying solely on data. The dataset utilized in this study is a publicly available dataset containing the AQI data at daily levels from various stations across multiple cities in India. The proposed AirSense-X approach achieves an accuracy of 98 %, with 97 % precision, 95 % recall, and an F1 score of 0.96, ensuring reliability. Similarly, the confusion matrix for the proposed approach indicated that the model correctly classified 21,306 and misclassified 268 instances. The key focuses of this study include: • Introducing a novel approach, AirSense-X, which employs PINN for accurate AQI prediction and XAI for enhanced interpretability. Additionally, the study also involves comparative analysis with conventional and ensemble ML and DL models. • Employing structure mapping technique for classification based on the predicted AQI values. • Integrating physical laws governing air pollution using a PINN model enhances prediction accuracy and ensures that the model learns beyond relying on data-driven insights.