Title: Improving Energy Efficiency of Medium-Duty and Heavy-Duty Vehicles through Connectivity and Automation

Abstract: Medium-duty and heavy-duty (MDHD) vehicles account for the second largest share (~21%) of energy consumed by the transportation sector in the U.S., and their share is projected to grow larger as a result of increasing e-commerce activity. At the same time, the transportation sector is going through transformational changes driven by automated, connected, electric, and shared (ACES) vehicle technologies, which have opened up new opportunities for significantly improving vehicle energy efficiency. In this seminar, recently completed research projects that utilize connectivity and automation to drive energy efficiency improvements in plug-in hybrid electric bus and conventional diesel truck will be discussed. In these research projects, a connected vehicle application called Eco-Approach and Departure (EAD) was developed and evaluated. The application takes advantage of communication between vehicle and traffic signal to optimize a vehicle’s speed profile as it approaches and departs a signalized intersection. In the application development, machine learning techniques were explored and used to enable real-time computation of optimal vehicle speed for energy efficiency, taking into account powertrain characteristics of the vehicle. The evaluation of the application—conducted through traffic simulation, hardware-in-the-loop testing, as well as real-world experiment—showed 5% to 25% vehicle energy efficiency improvements. The evaluation results demonstrated the EAD application’s potential to significantly improve energy efficiency of MDHD vehicles, especially those frequently traveling on signalized corridors such as transit buses and drayage trucks.

Bio: Dr. Kanok Boriboonsomsin is a Research Engineer and Associate Director of the College of Engineering – Center for Environmental Research and Technology at the University of California, Riverside. He has over 20 years of research and development experience in the areas of connected and automated vehicles, intelligent transportation systems, traffic operations, traffic simulation, vehicle energy and emissions modeling, and sustainable transportation. Dr. Boriboonsomsin currently serves as the Vice Chair of the Measurement and Modeling Subcommittee under the Air Quality and Greenhouse Gas Mitigation Committee of the Transportation Research Board. He also serves as an Associate Editor of IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Magazine. He is a member of IEEE, ITE, ITSCA, and SAE International.