Abstract:

A route-level total cost-of-ownership (TCO) modeling framework can determine the total cost of the vehicles and infrastructure required to transition a single route entirely to zero-emission technology. This paper presents the methods for development of representative drive cycles of urban bus fleet operations, the first step in a multi-step route-level TCO modeling framework. The development of a representative route-level drive cycle involves three steps. First, operational performance data are collected from buses traveling along these routes. Second, the data are reviewed to ensure data contained in the cycle development database are complete and contain valid data points. Third, a cycle development tool processes the data to obtain route-level drive cycles. Routes currently operated by the Bangalore Metropolitan Transport Corporation (BMTC) were used to illustrate the application of a drive cycle development tool. The results of the tool for four BMTC routes were compared against other available drive cycles. In addition, Autonomic energy simulation software provided comparisons of the energy performance of a zero-emission bus along an expanded set of ten BMTC routes with their drive cycles. The results demonstrate that representative drive cycles developed from GPS data can reflect the energy consumption of different technologies along the original routes.