Advanced Modelling and Energy Efficiency Prediction for Road Vehicles

Abstract: This thesis presents a first real world case-study of road transport operations that use the COVER format, in which the driver and the vehicle are regarded as separate entities. This format enables a complex representation of the transport operation that potentially better describe reality compared to the conventional representation used in today’s certification tools. The representation of operations treated in this thesis is called Operating Cycles and has been used to fully describe three representative transport missions from a case-study truck. Stochastically generated operating cycles have been used to create a large data set and thus prevent overfitting of specific cycles. The Operating Cycle-representation allowed for fair comparison between vehicle designs and ultimately manifested a vehicle composition that reduced the fuel consumption by nearly 10% for the same kind of transport operations.