Characterization of driving style and it's effects on fuel economy with eco-driving perspective on a heavy duty truck

With the increase in fossil fuel prices and concern on environmental effects, automobile makers spends much time and money on fuel efficiency. Nowadays, a diesel engine can go up 50% overall efficiency and this is really high when compared to ancestors of today's diesel engines. All of these improvements are driven by the idea of moving more with less fuel. Besides technological improvements, drivers can still affect fuel consumption on any type of vehicle. Any particular action the driver takes directly affects fuel consumption, either in a positive way or negative way. This study aims to investigate and characterize parameters that is only depended on driver's behaviour. How the drivers can become more eco-friendly drivers both by consuming less fuel and releasing less gases? Typical driving actions are acceleration, deceleration and gear shifting. These are the main events during an ordinary drive. In addition to these basic actions, anticipating the traffic flow which means adjusting vehicle speed according to the traffic flow in front or using vehicle's friction forces to slow the vehicle down can be contributing to fuel consumption in a positive way. In this study, driving actions detected and correlation between corresponding driving action and fuel consumption has been investigated. At the end an objective scoring function has been generated to evaluate drivers on pre-defined route. Data acquisition done by driving the vehicle on a pre-defined route by different drivers. One driver can driver more than once of which the details can be found in the introduction section. All driving data are post-processed by a Matlab based tool and then finally scoring tool that is another Matlab based tool does its job by using relevant parameter to generate a global score for each drive. During evaluation of each of criteria, fuel consumption and delivery time are kept in mind to find whether there is relevancy or not. As a result, the scoring function may be used to compare any driver to another one on the test route.