Parameter Guidelines for Electric Vehicle Route Planning

Abstract: There is an urgent need to migrate the vehicle industry from conventional combustion vehicles to electric vehicles due to pressing climate changes caused by the fossil fuel industry. The general public seem to have a prejudice against electric vehicles due to their limited range and the extra planning that may be required from the user. The market for electric vehicles is much more limited than for conventional vehicles, partially because it is a much younger industry. Buying an electric vehicle is also a bigger change than just buying a new car, one has to plan and manage the limited range in a new way. Unfortunately, it is more complicated to create a route planner for electric vehicles than for conventional vehicles and the market for such planners is limited. The complication is because an optimal route is better calculated by lowest energy consumption, rather than the shortest path. This requires more parameters in the routing algorithm to accurately calculate the energy consumption for individual vehicles. The problem attended to in this thesis is that no clear guidelines exist about which parameter affect the energy consumption in an electric vehicle and to what degree. The purpose of this thesis is to provide guidelines that can show which of nine chosen parameters to implement in an electric vehicle route planner. The parameters chosen in this thesis are already implemented in Simulation of Urban Mobility, a road traffic simulator. The simulator is used in this thesis to simulate electric vehicles with different parameter values and analyse the impact they have on the energy consumption when the values are incremented. The thesis shows that although some parameters have a relatively large impact on the energy consumption, it is hard to approximate the correct values for them, and therefore not worth implementing.