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Trained human raters have been used by organizations such as the Coordinating Research Council (CRC) to assess the vehicle driveability performance effect of fuel volatility. CRC conducts workshops to test fuel effects and their impact on vehicle driveability. CRC commissioned Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) to develop a “Trick Car” vehicle that could trigger malfunctions on-demand that mimic driveability events. This vehicle has been used to train novice personnel on the CRC Driveability Procedure E-28-94. While largely effective, even well-trained human raters can be inconsistent with other raters. Further, CRC rater workshop programs used to train and calibrate raters are infrequent, and there are a limited number of available trained raters. The goal of this program was to augment or substitute human raters with an electronic driveability sensing system.

Onboard sensing and external connectivity using Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V), Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) and Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) technologies allows a vehicle to "know" its future operating environment with some degree of certainty, greatly narrowing prior information gaps. The increased development of such connected and automated vehicle systems, currently used mostly for safety and driver convenience, presents new opportunities to improve the energy efficiency of individual vehicles [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]. Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in collaboration with Toyota Motor North America and University of Michigan is currently working on improving energy consumption of a Toyota Prius Prime 2017 by 20%. This paper will provide an overview of the various algorithms that are being developed to achieve the energy consumption target. Custom tools such as a traffic simulator was built to model traffic flow in Fort Worth, Texas with sufficient accuracy.