Track: Undergraduate Student Paper Competition

Abstract

Global warming and environmental pollution are common concerns for several agencies and society (RTVE, 2016), with transport being one of the sectors that contributes most to this problem (World Bank, 2014). One of the developments that help reduce its impact is the application of driving cycles in the design or redesign of vehicles adapting it to their specific needs, depending on the characteristics of the region under study and the way of driving. For this, it is required to have a driving cycle with representativeness of the driving patterns in a certain region or route. In order to obtain a representative driving cycle, a clear, justifiable and validated construction methodology must be available. 

The purpose of this study is to design a methodology to build driving cycles using statistical techniques, such as cluster analysis, and the construction method of driving cycles with micro-trips, which is the most commonly used and easy to handle method. The simultaneous application of these two techniques is the great value and the differentiating point with respect to the methodologies proposed until now.

Finally, a validation of the proposed methodology is performed by comparing the driving cycle obtained by the proposed methodology and the one generated by a deterministic methodology (the MWD-CP). The comparison was made in three selected variables: the average speed, idle speed and SAPD (speed acceleration probability distribution). Being the average speed one of the most used performance measures used for the evaluation of driving cycles, results show that the relative difference of this variable, when we compare the average from the sample data and the average from the proposed driving cycle, is 1.25% while the driving cycle obtained by the MWD-CP has 15.67% relative difference.