Human health is the driving force for setting the Ambient Air Quality Standards for the country. As per Auto Fuel Policy released by Govt. of India, Air Quality Monitoring and Source Apportionment Studies were initiated in six cities. Apart from determining emission data from other sources, the assessment of automotive emission inventory was done by conducting the emission testing on vehicles of different categories and vintages following a driving cycle. India has been following Modified Indian Driving Cycle (MIDC) adopted from European driving cycle which may not give a realistic assessment of vehicular emissions in laboratory as compared to on-road emissions. The variation could be due to different traffic density, land-use patterns, road infrastructure and traffic management encountered in India as compared to Europe.
This paper presents the evolution of Driving Cycle developed for passenger cars in Delhi. The entire exercise was divided into 5 major components including selection of representative routes, vehicles, measuring instruments, data analysis methodology and validation of final driving cycle. Seven routes were selected considering Home-to-Work trips covering major landmarks and traffic zones across Delhi. Traffic monitoring was conducted for 3 days (16 hrs/day) at 21 sites on selected routes. The data acquisition was carried out on 4 passenger cars covering 224 trips and spanning 120 days. The driving patterns generated from each trip were statistically analysed following the micro-trip approach on the basis of different traffic conditions like congested, semi-urban, urban and extra-urban with the help of specifically designed software based on in-house developed algorithm. Suitable boundary conditions depending upon the traffic conditions in Delhi were incorporated for identifying and eliminating the redundant data in order to derive a realistic speed time sequence. The finalised cycle was validated on the chassis dynamometer based on the on-road fuel consumption.