Development of Driving Cycle using Monte Carlo Method for Evaluating Vehicle Design Fitness to Application

Driving cycles are mostly developed in order to investigate emissions, fuel consumptions and/or legislations defined for a particular vehicle. On the other hand, automotive powertrains are designed or selected according to power demand analysis and simulations which are closely related to the vehicle driving pattern. When a car is utilized for a non-purposed application, its driving cycle is different so the design targets are not met. It results in lower efficiency and waste of resources, due to over or under engineering and lack of satisfaction. In this study, driving cycle of a typical passenger car is investigated in order to evaluate its design fitness. The driving cycle of the car is a combination of long modal trips which are assembled by large sets of transient micro-trips. It is constructed using actual data collected by a GPS and data logger. After filtering noises by LOWESS technique, statistical distribution of the dataset is verified so that Monte Carlo method can be implemented. Based on the acceleration results of the simulation, power demands of the vehicle and duty cycles can be derived and compared to the engine characteristics. The discrepancies indicate that the design of the vehicle powertrain does not match its application especially as a fix-route taxi.