GPS Based Methodology for Drive Cycle Determination

Drive cycles are an important tool to a vehicle development team. In order to achieve good design tunes, an accurate drive cycle is important. It is essential that errors occurring out of drive cycles be contained within the level of data scatter obtained from the use of a drive cycle. For example: fuel consumption. Only an accurate drive cycle will be able to highlight the small differences associated with minor changes to vehicle specification that affect fuel consumption.

A methodology has been established to derive a drive cycle representative of real life usage. This has been done using a GPS based system. Recombination methodology was used to recreate a synthetic drive cycle from actual driving conditions. Correlation was determined using synthesis of sequences as observed in actual data. Results show that the drive cycle data matches very well with actual values of fuel consumption under real life conditions.