The Effect of Driving Cycle Duration on Its Representativeness

Abstract

There is an increasing interest in properly representing local driving patterns. The most frequent alternative to describe driving patterns is through a representative time series of speed, denominated driving cycle (DC). However, the DC duration is an important factor in achieving DC representativeness. Long DCs involve high testing costs, while short DCs tend to increase the uncertainty of the fuel consumption and tailpipe emissions results. There is not a defined methodology to establish the DC duration. This study aims to study the effect of different durations of the DCs on their representativeness. We used data of speed, time, fuel consumption, and emissions obtained by monitoring for two months the regular operation of a fleet of 15 buses running in two flat urban regions with different traffic conditions. Using the micro-trips method, we constructed DCs with a duration of 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 45, 60, and 120 min for each region. For each duration, we repeated the process 500 times in order to establish the trend and dispersion of the DC characteristic parameters. The results indicate that to obtain driving pattern representativeness, the DCs must last at least 25 min. This duration also guarantees the DC representativeness in terms of energy consumption and tailpipe emissions.

Driving cycle development methods: case study in Malaysia

“…A practical approach was used to develop the driving cycle by utilising micro-trip methodologies and actual driving data. The micro-trips method is the most frequently used method to construct representative DC [36]. When designing the driving cycle, the following characteristics were taken into account: average speed, average running speed, average acceleration, average deceleration, percentage of idling, percentage of cruising, percentage of acceleration, percentage of deceleration, number of stops per kilometre travelled and positive kinetic energy (PKE).…”

Representative Driving Cycles for Trinidad and Tobago with Slope Profiles for Electric Vehicles

“…For the Trinidad and Tobago driving cycle, target conditions were calculated from the real-world data sets for each compiled route type using statistical parameters as follows: To ensure that a driving cycle is representative when using the microtrip method and analyzing the trend and dispersion of driving cycle statistical parameters, it was found that an overall duration of at least 25 min is necessary to represent energy consumption and emissions (24). It is noted, however, that this duration was based on a bus driving cycle so more work is needed to verify that a similar duration is necessary for a light-vehicle driving cycle.…”