Development of Hybrid Vehicle Energy Consumption Model for Transportation Applications—Part II: Traction Force-Speed Based Energy Consumption Modeling

In the transportation sector, the fuel consumption model is a fundamental tool for vehicles’ energy consumption and emission analysis. Over the past decades, vehicle-specific power (VSP) has been enormously adopted in a number of studies to estimate vehicles’ instantaneous driving power. Then, the relationship between the driving power and fuel consumption is established as a fuel consumption model based on statistical approaches. This study proposes a new methodology to improve the conventional energy consumption modeling methods for hybrid vehicles. The content is organized into a two-paper series. Part I captures the driving power equation development and the coefficient calibration for a specific vehicle model or fleet. Part II focuses on hybrid vehicles’ energy consumption modeling, and utilizes the equation obtained in Part I to estimate the driving power. Also, this paper has discovered that driving power is not the only primary factor that influences hybrid vehicles’ energy consumption. This study introduces a new approach by applying the fundamental of hybrid powertrain operation to reduce the errors and drawbacks of the conventional modeling methods. This study employs a new driving power estimation equation calibrated for the third generation Toyota Prius from Part I. Then, the Traction Force-Speed Based Fuel Consumption Model (TFS model) is proposed. The combination of these two processes provides a significant improvement in fuel consumption prediction error compared to the conventional VSP prediction method. The absolute maximum error was reduced from 57% to 23%, and more than 90% of the predictions fell inside the 95% confidential interval. These validation results were conducted based on real-world driving data. Furthermore, the results show that the proposed model captures the efficiency variation of the hybrid powertrain well due to the multi-operation mode transition throughout the variation of the driving conditions. This study also provides a supporting analysis indicating that the driving mode transition in hybrid vehicles significantly affects the energy consumption. Thus, it is necessary to consider these unique characteristics to the modeling process.