Dr. Gareth Milton
Chief Engineer
Ricardo Innovations

Traditionally, engine and vehicle testing for fuel consumption and CO2 emissions has been conducted using a pre-defined drive cycle or mission defined by time, velocity, gradient and distance. Cycle-based Measurement is highly repeatable, allowing the impact of new technologies to be assessed by comparing the measured fuel consumption results. 

An issue with cycle-based Measurement is that it fails to give insight into the impact of the real-world environment, such as traffic and weather, on the vehicle’s fuel consumption. This is particularly important when new technologies are considered that respond to changes in the real-world environment, such as Connected (electronic) eHorizon, Vehicle to Vehicle (V2V) and Vehicle to Infrastructure (V2I) systems.

Fitting portable emissions and fuel consumption equipment to the vehicle to take real-world measurements allows assessment, but at high cost. Modern engineering methods focus heavily on Simulation tools to work in the most efficient and cost effective manner.

This presentation demonstrates a Simulation tool that couples complete dynamic vehicle models with an environment model utilising agent-based traffic micro-Simulation. The vehicle models include the vehicle-side connected technologies and advanced control systems, whilst the environment model uses the simulated traffic situation to provide data to in-the-loop backend information providers. This allows Simulation of the interaction between the vehicle and connected technologies under a wide range of environmental and traffic conditions.

Using this environment in combination with the “Macro model based development approach”, we assess the fuel consumption benefit achieved by adding connected eHorizon technology and advanced predictive energy management to Heavy Goods Vehicles under real-world conditions. Data generated from the Simulation tool are used to characterise response models of the vehicle’s fuel consumption to a wide range of factors in the real world environment. Through these response models an assessment can be made of the fuel consumption benefit of a given technology configuration under any real-world situation, not only on a specific cycle. This allows rapid development and Validation of optimisation and control concepts in the virtual environment. Further, it is a precondition to compare the results with final road measurements, since the traffic situation will vary in an unpredictable way during the Validation Measurement on the road. The measured fuel consumption will only be comparable with the simulated one when there are similar environment and traffic situations in both cases: this is exactly the intention of the suggested approach.

The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement n° 713783 (IMPERIUM) and from the Swiss State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation (SERI) under contract n°16.0063 for the Swiss consortium members.