Development of Virtual Fuel Economy Trend Evaluation Process 2019-01-0510

With the advance of the autonomous vehicle development, the possibilities to improve fuel economy increased significantly by changing the driver or powertrain response under different traffic conditions. Development of new fuel-efficient driving strategies requires extensive experiments and simulations in the traffic. In this paper, a fuel efficiency simulator environment with existing simulator software such as Simulink, Vissim, Sumo, and CarSim will be developed to reduce the effort for developing new fuel-efficient algorithms. Simulation environment will be created by combining a mid-sized sedan MATLAB-Simulink model with a realistic traffic simulation. To simulate the traffic realistically, real roads from urban and highway sections will be modeled in the simulator with different traffic densities. Other traffic elements which would affect the fuel consumption, such as speed limit information, traffic stop sign and traffic light with SPaT (Signal Phase and Timing) information, will also be a part of the simulator. In order to evaluate the performance of the developed algorithms, fuel efficiency performance of the developed algorithms would be compared with a fuel efficiency performance of a simple driver model, the Intelligent Driver Model (IDM). Therefore, the IDM with different aggressiveness levels will be integrated to the simulation environment. Finally, the developed simulation environment will be integrated to the CarSim for sensor simulation capabilities. This developed simulation environment aims to accelerate development of fuel-efficient algorithms.