Significance a Standard Terrain-Based Drive-cycle for Light Electric Vehicles (EV) Performance Evaluation

In this paper, a terrain-based drive-cycle which includes a road grade profile is synthesized for city, and hilly highways in Nepal. The terrain-based drive-cycle data was collected using global positioning system trackers placed on vehicles to record speed and position. The drive-cycle is synthesized using the micro-trip modeling method which creates multiple micro trips using the transition probability of instances such as acceleration, deceleration, idle and cruise. The data for elevation is generated from the position data and the road angle is also used in the micro trip modeling for generating precise time, speed and road angle. The synthesized drive-cycle is compared with three other standard drive-cycles using an electric vehicle (EV) model in MATLAB/Simulink to determine energy consumption and range of the vehicle. A simulation with and without considering road grade yielded a range difference of nearly twice in the same model.