Fuel Rate Prediction for Heavy-Duty Trucks

Fuel cost contributes significantly to the high operation cost of heavy-duty trucks. Developing fuel rate prediction models is the cornerstone of fuel consumption optimization approaches for heavy-duty trucks. However, limited by accurate features directly related to the truck’s fuel consumption, state-of-the-art models show poor performance and are rarely deployed in practice. In this paper, we use the truck’s engine management system (EMS) and Instant Fuel Meter (IFM) to collect a three-month dataset during the period of December 2019 to June 2020. Seven prediction models, including linear regression, polynomial regression, MLP, CNN, LSTM, CNN-LSTM, and AutoML, are investigated and evaluated to predict real-time fuel rate. The evaluation results show that the EMS and IFM dataset help to improve the coefficient of determination of traditional linear/polynomial models from 0.87 to 0.96, while learning-based approach AutoML improves the coefficient of determination to attain 0.99. Besides, we explore the actual deployment of fuel rate prediction with transfer learning and path planning for autonomous driving.