Journey Mapping: A New Approach for Defining Automotive Drive Cycles

Abstract

Driving has become a very common activity for most of the people around the world today. People are becoming more and more dependent on vehicles, contributing to the growth of automotive industry. New vehicles are released regularly into the market in order to meet the high demand. With the increase in demand, the importance of vehicle testing has also increased by many folds. Besides testing new vehicles for their performance prediction, existing vehicles also need to be tested in order to check their compliance to safety standards. Drive Cycles that have been traditionally defined as velocity over time profiles are used as vehicle testing beds. The need for re-defining drive cycles is demonstrated through the high deviations between the predicted and the actual performance values. As such, a new approach for defining automotive drive cycles, Journey Mapping, is proposed. Journey Mapping defines a drive cycle more realistically as the journey of a particular vehicle from an origin to the destination, which during its journey is influenced by various conditions such as weather, terrain, traffic, driver behavior, road , vehicle and aerodynamic. This concept of Journey Mapping has been implemented using AMESim for a Ford Focus Electric 2012. Journey Mapping was seen to predict its energy consumption with about 5% error; whereas, the error was about 13% when it was tested against the US06 cycle, which provided the most accurate results out of the various traditional drive cycles used for testing for the selected scope.