Development of Automobile Bangkok Driving Cycle For Emissions and Fuel Consumption Assessment
Development of Automobile Bangkok Driving Cycle For Emissions and Fuel Consumption Assessment
Development of Automobile Bangkok Driving Cycle For Emissions and Fuel Consumption Assessment
Development of Automobile Bangkok Driving Cycle for Emissions and Fuel Consumption Assessment
Abstract: The exhaust emissions and fuel consumption rate of newly registered automobiles in Thailand are now assessed from the
European standard driving cycle. The European driving cycle shows the characteristics of vehicles operating conditions for various
speeds and acceleration ranges, but does not represent realistic speed-time history of a vehicle in actual traffic. As the driving
conditions are different, the assessment results using this driving cycle may not produce realistic amounts of emissions and fuel
consumption of the cars under Bangkok traffic which is well known for its congestion. The objective of this research is therefore to
propose a method to develop a driving cycle to represent Bangkok traffic. A method for selecting the representative road routes in
Bangkok was firstly proposed. A gasoline passenger car equipped with a real time data logger was then used to collect speed-time
data under actual traffic along the selected road routes in Bangkok urban area for two months. The driving characteristics were
analyzed from the speed-time data and its target driving parameters were defined and evaluated. The method for generating the
driving cycle was then proposed and described. After achieving a driving cycle, exhaust emissions and fuel consumption of a vehicle
were measured by driving a car on a standard chassis dynamometer according to the obtained Bangkok driving cycle. Comparison of
the exhaust emission test and fuel consumption test results obtained from the constructed driving cycle with those obtained from the
presently-adopted European standard cycle had been made.
Keywords: Driving Cycle, Driving Pattern, Driving Characteristics, Exhaust Emissions, Fuel Consumption
1. INTRODUCTION
A driving cycle is a time series of vehicle speeds recorded at successive (equally spaced) time points [1]. It represents a typical
driving pattern for the population of a city. For emission testing, a test driving cycle in the most general case, attempts to synthesize
real driving conditions with respect to a number of measures, including speed, acceleration, specific power, trip patterns, road grade,
and temperature. Driving cycles have been developed to provide a single speed-time profile that is representative of urban driving.
Standard driving cycles have a wide range of uses [2]. Vehicle manufacturers need these cycles to provide a long term basis for
design, tooling and marketing. Traffic engineers require driving cycles in the design of traffic control systems and simulation of
traffic flows and delays. Environmentalists are concerned with the performance of the vehicle in terms of the pollutants generated,
while negotiating specific driving patterns. Furthermore, a speed-time trace can provide a convenient laboratory-based means to
estimate fuel consumption and emissions of vehicles within the respective urban areas.
In order to investigate the amounts of exhausted gas emissions and fuel consumption rates of vehicles traveling in Bangkok, a
generic driving characteristic or pattern for any vehicle traveling in the traffic of the city under consideration must be established. So
far there is no such driving cycle officially developed for representing Bangkok traffic. The driving cycle used for the assessment of
the exhaust emissions of newly registered automobiles in Thailand is based upon the standard driving cycle of the European
Community (called ECE cycle) [3] where the driving conditions are not the same. Furthermore, it is modal driving cycle which
derived from various representative constant acceleration and speed driving modes contrast to the cycle that constructed from the real
microtrips obtained from actual on-road driving data such as the US75 cycle and Melbourne peak cycle. Thus, this driving cycle may
not produce a realistic assessment of the emissions for Bangkok traffic. Hence an appropriate driving cycle for motor vehicles in
Bangkok is needed to be established.
Therefore the objective of this study is to develop a more realistic driving cycle for uses in the assessment of exhaust emissions
and fuel consumption of automobiles traveling in Bangkok. It is hope that the developed Bangkok driving cycle, which is more
realistic to represent Bangkok traffic conditions, can be adopted for tests of vehicles running in Bangkok in order to report the real
world performance of vehicles in service. Thus providing information for Thailands energy and environmental agencies on how to
set up proper national standards for the motor vehicles fuel consumption and exhaust emissions. It is also hoped that the proposed
methods could be used for other big cities as well as for other types of vehicle.
2. METHODOLOGY
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The 2nd Joint International Conference on Sustainable Energy and Environment (SEE 2006)
F-027 (O) 21-23 November 2006, Bangkok, Thailand
determined from the vehicle traffic flow data by using traffic flow model introduced by Greenshield [5]. The traffic flow data
contains the collection of number of vehicles passing over sections of road along the main roads during a time interval at desired time
periods of the day. These data collections are normally conducted by traffic authorities in most big cities.
The first step in the road route selection starts with the analysis of these traffic flow data. From the available vehicle flow data, a
traffic flow model, is applied to determine the travel speed of the cars along each section of major road routes considered. Ascending
these travel speeds determined for all road sections of all major road routes, the distribution of travel speeds of vehicles in the area
can then be established. Moreover, the average speed for each major road route can be estimated from the speeds of its corresponding
road sections. And eventually, by averaging the speeds of the whole road sections, the mean speed of vehicles traveling in the
considered city can be determined.
The second step of the methodology is to select a few major road routes so that their distribution of vehicle speeds of all road
sections along those selected major roads is closely matched to that of the whole major roads previously established. The matching
can be justified by some statistical parameters e.g. variances and mean. These few major road routes are therefore expected to cover
all driving speed patterns occurring in the city and can be used as representative road routes for conducting real driving tests to
collect the driving characteristics (i.e. speed versus time data) of vehicles which will be later used for the construction of the driving
cycle of vehicles traveling in the city.
The above described method is applied to the collected traffic flow data along 20 main road routes in Bangkok. Distribution of the
vehicle travel speed from the whole 20 main road routes in Bangkok is shown in Fig. 1. Based on the set guideline from the above
second step method seven road routes are then selected. These selected road routes give a good agreement of the distribution of travel
speeds(as shown in Fig.1) with that of the whole main road routes. They are consists of Silom Rd., Petchaburi Rd., Sukhumvit Rd.,
Ladprao Rd., Paholyothin Rd., Jarunsanitwong Rd. and Wipawadee Rd.. According to the selection, Silom Rd. was selected to
represent the highly congested traffic condition with average travel speed less than 10 km/h while Petchaburi Rd., Sukhumvit Rd.,
Ladprao Rd. and Paholyothin Rd. were selected to represent the congested traffic condition with average travel speed more than 10
km/h to 20 km/h. Jarunsanitwong Rd. characterized the moderate traffic condition with average travel speed from more than 20 km/h
to 30 km/h, and Wipawadee Rd. characterized the lightest traffic condition with average travel speed more than 30 km/h.
100
40
Cumulative distribution,%
80
Distribution of car, %
10 20
0 0
u
5 10 1
5
2
0
2
5
3
0
3
5
4
0
4
5
5
0
5
5
6
0 60
0< u <u <u <u <u <u <u <u <u <u <u u>
5< 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 55
Speed range, km/h
Fig. 1 Comparisons between vehicle travel speed distributions from the selected seven road routes
and those from the whole 20 main road routes in Bangkok
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The 2nd Joint International Conference on Sustainable Energy and Environment (SEE 2006)
F-027 (O) 21-23 November 2006, Bangkok, Thailand
35
30
25
Speed, km/h
20
15
10
0
0 120 240 360 480 600
Time, s
driving situations. The driving parameters of each microtrip are calculated. These microtrips are then grouped based on their average
velocities. For each velocity interval, every microtrip is given an equal probability the value of which is calculated based on the
number of microtrips in the interval.
A computer simulation program has been developed in order to generate a driving cycle according to the proposed procedure. The
program will extract the desired microtrips from the real microtrip database into five speed ranges. These speed ranges are given with
an equal probability to be randomly chosen during the cycle simulation process. Similarly, in the selection of a microtrip from any
speed range, each microtrip in the range is given an equal probability which can be calculated based on the number of microtrips in
the range. To commence the driving cycle construction, the program will first generate a random number to select the speed range
and then another random number to select a microtrip from the selected speed range. The values of three driving parameters (the
average running speed (V1avg), percentages of number of microtrips (%Nm) and their time spans (%Tm)) of the selected microtrip are
calculated and compared with their corresponding target parameters prior to selecting the next microtrip. Whenever a new microtrip
is selected and added to the previously selected ones to become a new set of microtrips, those three driving parameters for each speed
interval of the new set of microtrip are determined to check whether they are lower or higher than their corresponding values of target
parameters. The next step is to compare the determined average running speed (V1avg) of this new set of the selected microtrips with
the target average speed. Depending on whether it is higher or lower, the next microtrip is then guided to be randomly selected from
the proper speed ranges remaining in the updated database so that the new average speed would become closer to the target value.
The satisfied microtrip is then connected to the previously established series of microtrips. The whole procedure is repeated until the
desired running duration of the cycle is reached. The desired running duration of the cycle is the total driving cycle duration less the
idle duration. The total duration of the driving cycle is considered based on the fact that it should be long enough to describe all
traffic situations and obtain the emissions sufficiently. Therefore, the total driving cycle duration in this study is set at 1200 seconds
which is within the range used by various well-known driving cycles [7,8]. The idle duration of the cycle is calculated in proportion
to the percentage of idle duration of the real on-road driving data. Finally, when equal idle periods are inserted in-between these
microtrips a driving cycle is formed. A number of generated driving cycles can be obtained from the simulation. In order to choose
the one which can be best representative to the actual driving conditions, the driving parameters of the generated driving cycle must
be closest to the target statistics.
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F-027 (O) 21-23 November 2006, Bangkok, Thailand
% Cumulative
% Time Spent
60
30 50
40
20
30
20
10
10
0 0
V=0 0<V10 10<V20 20<V30 30<V40 V>40
Speed, km/h
Fig. 3 Distribution of time spent in various speed ranges
60
50
Speed, km/h
40
30
20
10
0
0 200 400 600 800 1000 1200
Time, s
Vmax = 62 km/h; Accmax = 2.7 m/s2; Decmax = -3.3 m/s2; length = 1160 s; distance = 5.71 km
Fig. 4 Bangkok driving cycle
Table 1 also compares the characteristics of the Bangkok driving cycle with the ECE15+EUDC regulatory driving cycle which
Thailand currently used as a legislative driving cycle. It shows that the average speed of Bangkok cycle is 89% less than that of the
ECE15+EUDC cycle. Moreover, the Bangkok cycle exhibits about 37% greater idle time than ECE15+EUDC. For the value of PKE
which indicates the amount of energy expended in accelerating a vehicle during a drive cycle test, the Bangkok cycle is different
from the ECE15+EUDC cycle. It is 52% greater than ECE15+EUDC cycle. The average acceleration rate of Bangkok cycle is also
larger than that of the ECE15+EUDC cycle. On overall consideration, it can be concluded that the traffic in Bangkok is more serious
than the ECE15+EUDC cycle. Therefore larger values in both emissions and fuel consumption would be obtained from the test of
vehicles using the Bangkok driving cycle. For the microtrip characteristics, it is clearly seen that driving with low speeds of less than
10 km/h occurs most frequently in Bangkok cycle while it could not be observed these situations in the ECE15+EUDC cycle. From
the microtrip characteristics discussed above, distinctive difference of driving patterns for different cities can be noticed. Prominence
of microtrips in Bangkok are the short trips with low speed used and frequent stop (idle speed) as a result of the traffic problems.
When particular attention is taken to the ECE15+EUDC cycle, it is obvious that the ECE15+EUDC cycle does not reflect the actual
traffic situations in Bangkok and would no longer be suitable to be used as a standard test cycle for estimating the exhaust emissions
and fuel consumption of automobiles running in Bangkok traffic.
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F-027 (O) 21-23 November 2006, Bangkok, Thailand
Table 1 Comparisons of Bangkok driving cycle (BDC) and European driving cycle (ECE15+EUDC)
Driving cycles Driving parameters
length duration Vavg V1avg Accavg Decavg %Idle %Cruise %Acc. %Dec. PKE
(km) (s) (km/h) (km/h) (m/s2) (m/s2) (%) (%) (%) (%) (m/s2)
BDC 5.71 1160 17.7 28.8 0.674 -0.687 37.7 23.8 15.3 23.2 0.47
ECE15+EUDC 10.9 1180 33.4 44.4 0.541 -0.789 23.7 42.2 18.3 15.8 0.224
Microtrip parameters
%Nm %Tm
0<V10 10<V20 20<V30 30<V40 V > 40 0<V10 10<V20 20<V30 30<V40 V > 40
BDC 42.9 21.4 14.3 14.3 7.1 9.3 23.6 10.3 28.3 28.6
ECE15+EUDC 0 30.8 30.8 30.8 7.6 0 7.2 20.7 31.6 40.5
Table 2 Total emissions and fuel consumption of the test vehicle under specified driving cycles
Total Distance Cruise Idle Average Fuel
HC NOx CO CO2
Driving cycle time period period speed consumption
(s) (km) (%) (%) (km/h) (g/km) (l/100 km)
BDC 1160 5.71 23.8 37.7 17.7 0.134 0.557 2.093 206.371 8.48
ECE15 780 4.05 32.3 30.8 18.7 0.125 0.409 0.714 187.712 7.63
EUDC 400 6.85 67.5 10 62.6 0.045 0.564 0.470 155.727 6.32
ECE15+EUDC 1180 10.9 42.2 23.7 33.4 0.075 0.506 0.561 167.611 6.81
The relative increase in BDC cycle emissions and fuel consumption over the Thai currently-used ECE15+EUDC cycle are
determined. Comparisons between the newly-developed BDC cycle and the Thai currently-used ECE15+EUDC cycle reveal that the
emission factors (g/km) of HC and CO of the BDC cycle are almost two and four times greater than those of the ECE cycle
respectively. For NOx emissions, although the ECE15+EUDC cycle is suffered from the extreme accelerations at high speed driving
which result in high emission rate (g/s) of NOx, but because of its much less proportion of idle driving, the NOx emission factor
(g/km) is found smaller than that of the BDC cycle by 10%. Under the BDC cycle, the test vehicle needs 1.67 more liters of fuel or
about 23% more to cover 100 km distance than it does under the ECE15+EUDC cycle. All of these differences are mainly due to the
greater proportion of idle periods and higher fluctuations of vehicle speed in the BDC cycle.
4. CONCLUSION
The objective of this research is to propose a method to develop a driving cycle to represent Bangkok traffic. This method has
been tested with the on-road speed-time data collections on the selected road routes in Bangkok. After achieving a driving cycle,
exhaust emissions and fuel consumption of a vehicle were measured by driving a car on a standard chassis dynamometer according to
the obtained Bangkok driving cycle. Comparison of the exhaust emission test and fuel consumption test results obtained from the
constructed driving cycle with those obtained from the presently-adopted European standard cycle had been made.
In the study of route selection, the methodology for selecting the best representative routes in Bangkok for gathering speed-time
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The 2nd Joint International Conference on Sustainable Energy and Environment (SEE 2006)
F-027 (O) 21-23 November 2006, Bangkok, Thailand
data to build up the Bangkok driving cycle was proposed. The basic traffic flow model was introduced to investigate the actual traffic
situations in Bangkok. Consequently, the selections of road routes in Bangkok which best reflect the predominant driving patterns
determined from the referred model were done. Seven road routes which closely matched on their vehicle speed distribution to that of
the whole major roads established were then chosen. The selected road routes can best represent the Bangkok traffic which give the
dominant patterns occur in actual traffic situations. Data collection along the selected road routes in Bangkok was conducted. The
driving characteristics of Bangkok traffic were then investigated. The method in constructing driving cycle for Bangkok was then
presented in this study. The presented method can construct driving cycle which gives the statistical parameters best match to the
actual parameters. The Bangkok driving cycle which best represent the actual driving conditions in Bangkok was obtained.
Comparisons of the obtained Bangkok driving cycle with Thai regulatory driving cycle were investigated. It can be concluded that
the driving conditions of the European standard cycle which currently adopted for testing of vehicles in Bangkok on compliance with
national emission standards certification are quite different from the Bangkok traffic situations.
From the emission testing result, it can be concluded that the emissions obtained from the Bangkok driving cycle is quite different
from those obtained from ECE due to the different driving conditions. Consequently, the use of ECE driving cycle as the standard for
testing newly registered automobile in Thailand is may not appropriate. Therefore there should be conduct the study to construct our
own driving cycle for Thailand to regulate the emission standard. It is also hoped that the proposed methods of both route selection
and driving cycle construction could be used for other big cities or the obtained driving cycle could be modified for other varying
traffic situation. Such the proposed method could be adapted for other types of vehicle such as city buses and pick-up trucks.
5. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Financial support for this research is partly funded by the Energy Policy and Planning Office (EPPO) of Thailand. The authors
would like to acknowledge the Automotive Emission Laboratory of the Pollution Control Department for the co-operative of the
emission testing.
6. REFERENCES
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[3] Thai Industrial Standards Institute (TISI). (1999) Thai Industrial Standard (TIS 1870-1999) Gasoline Engined Vehicles: Safety
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