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The evaluation of vehicles real emissions circulating in urban areas is a basic activity for planning and management of implemented traffic measures aiming at emission control and air quality improvement. National, region, and city emission inventories require overall average emission estimation based on modeling technique with a few input parameters such as fleet composition and mission profile, represented by average speed. But in the field of emission modeling an important open issue is the very expensive costs of experimental campaigns needed to obtain driving cycle statistically representative of driving behavior, also if only in a specific link of a network. A possible approach to deal with this problem is represented by the use of traffic microscopic simulation models which are capable to simulate individual car motion on the basis of traffic conditions, road characteristics and management rules.

An experimental campaign was carried out to evaluate the influence of CNG and gasoline on the exhaust emissions and fuel consumption of a bi-fuel passenger car over on-road tests performed in the city of Naples. The chosen route is very traffic congested during the daytime of experimental measurements. An on-board analyzer was used to measure CO, CO2, NOx tailpipe concentrations and the exhaust flow rate. Throughout a carbon balance on the exhaust pollutants, the fuel consumption was estimated. The exact spatial position was acquired by a GPS which allowed to calculate vehicle speed and the traffic condition was monitored by a video camera. Whole trip realized by the vehicle was subdivided in succession of kinematic sequences and the vehicle emissions and fuel consumption were analyzed and presented as value on each kinematic sequence. Moreover, throughout a multivariate statistical analysis of sequences, the driving cycles characterizing the use of vehicle were identified.

In the context of a transport sustainability, some solutions could be proposed from the integration of many disciplines, architects, environmentalists, policy makers, and consequently it may be addressed with different approaches. These solutions would be applied at different geographical levels, i.e. national, regional or urban scale. Moreover, the assessment of cars emissions in real use plays a fundamental role for their reductions. This is also the direction of the new harmonized test procedures (WLTP). Furthermore, it is fundamental to keep in mind that the new WLTC cycle will reproduce a situation closer to the reality comparing to the EUDC/NEDC driving cycle. In this paper, we will be focused on vehicle kinematic evaluation aimed at valuation of traffic situation and emissions.

The problem of emission evaluation control and modelling is nowadays an open question. In the framework of a Decision Support System (DSS), a new approach was developed for modeling and evaluating automotive pollutant emissions. An interesting point of this proposal was the integration of the micro simulated model to obtain driving cycle. In fact an important open issue is the very expensive costs of experimental campaigns needed to obtain driving cycle statistically representative of driving behaviour. So to overcome these high costs and to extend the real vehicle operating conditions framework, a possible solution is to integrate a microsimulation model in the general context of emission modeling. But the reliability of driving cycles coming from simulation models must be evaluated with respect to the possible influence on test bench measured emissions. In this paper, we would try to present some results related to two aspects of the problem.

In this paper some results relative to tests performed on road with a Fiat Panda Bipower, (CNG and gasoline powered), and a New Panda Twin Air with auto Start & Stop system, are presented. Gaseous emissions are measured with Portable Emission Measurement Systems (PEMS) on two different urban routes, in terms of traffic and slope characteristics during in use experiments. PEMS testing offers an easy and efficient way to evaluate the vehicle emissions over a huge variety of conditions and provides us a direct way to study the in-use emissions of combustion engines, when you want to verify the effect of the traffic and of a particular device on fuel economy and emissions reduction. Moreover now PEMS performances are very comparable to those obtained by standard laboratory instrumentation systems.

In this paper, first results regarding measurements of fuel consumption and emissions, relative to different traffic conditions and a specific urban area, are presented. The experimental approach used for the evaluation of emissions consists in: a) recording on-road car and engine operating conditions during designed trips performed in the center of Naples (Italy) by an instrumented car, b) determining by multivariate statistical analysis driving cycles characterizing typical traffic conditions, c) measuring emissions and fuel consumption in laboratory using defined driving cycles. Fuel flow rate measurements are performed at each second, while emissions are detected along a cycle and an average value per kilometer is obtained. Operating conditions of engine during laboratory testing are related to on-road operating conditions by comparing fuel consumption and exhaust gases temperatures measurements performed on-road and in laboratory by the same device.

A reason of the lack of agreement between measured pollutants concentration in the air of urban areas and vehicle pollutant emissions evaluated by available emission models is the fact that catalyst performance variability is not considered. In this paper, an experimental study on the effect of performance variability of catalyst on emissions is presented. Average emissions have been measured using driving cycles representative of different levels of urban traffic, determined by statistical methods on the basis of data detected on-road by an instrumented car. For each driving cycle, representative of a certain traffic level, different thermal starting conditions of catalyst have been tested. These conditions have been determined by the characterization of catalyst performance at steady state and are representative of real catalyst conditions experienced on the road.

The aim of this study is to investigate the parameters influencing the real driving emission monitoring with particular attention towards the influence of road gradient. For this purpose, an experimental activity was carried out with a Euro 5 Diesel light-duty vehicle, driven along two tracks of Naples characterized by a different road gradient: the first pattern is quite flat, the second includes positive (+2.9%) and negative (−3.6%) road gradient. Exhaust emissions of CO, THC, NOx, CO2 were acquired on road by using a portable emission measuring system (PEMS) connected also to the Engine Control Unit for saving the main engine parameters and to the GPS for the geographical coordinates and altitude. The acquired speed profiles were repeated on the chassis-dynamometer without simulating the road gradient.

The Real Driving Emission (RDE) procedure will measure the pollutants, such as NOx, emitted by cars while driven on the road. RDE will not replace laboratory tests, such as the current WLTP but it will be added to them. RDE is complementary to the laboratory-based procedure to check the pollutant emissions level of a light-duty vehicle in real driving conditions. This means that the car will be driven on a real road according to random acceleration and deceleration patterns conditioned by traffic flow. So, the procedure will ensure that cars deliver real emissions over on-road and so the currently observed differences between emissions measured in the laboratory and those measured on road under real-world conditions, will be reduced. However, the identification of a path on the road to check the test conditions of RDE is not easy and hardly repeatable.