Evaluating different methods for determining road grade best suited to advanced bus transportation systems

Abstract

Real world fuel consumption and emission models are sensitive to road grade estimates. The developments of eco-routing and eco-driving solutions makes the development of large scale collections of road grade profiles of importance. Therefore, there is a need to collect accurate, large scale, road grade profiles. Existing intelligent transport systems (ITS) like Advanced Bus Transportation Systems (ABTS) provide an opportunity to collect large amounts of data for post processing development of road grade profiles. This paper explores different techniques for determining road grade estimates suited to ABTS. Five studies were replicated in this work and evaluated in real world experiments against the Google Elevation API.