A novel methodology for construction of driving cycles for Indian cities

Driving cycle (DC) forms a critical component in several of the vehicle emissions estimation procedures. It has been observed to vary with region due to the factors relating to geography, infrastructure, vehicle class etc. However, in India, only two polygonal DCs, Indian Driving Cycle and Modified Indian Driving Cycle, are used for the emission testing of all motor vehicles for regulatory purposes. Several improvements have been made in the construction methodologies of DCs since these were last formulated. While there has been a surge of interest in this area of research in India and DCs were constructed for several Indian cities, most of the studies use microtrips as their basic construction units, some of which have used parameters with rather unintuitive interpretations, especially in the context of mixed traffic of the developing economies like India. A new construction unit is proposed in this article called trip segment, along with an algorithm to extract those units from the given data and a methodology to construct driving cycles. The proposed methodology is used to construct a new DC for passenger cars in Bangalore, India, which is compared with the other existing DCs of cities in and out of India. Significant differences have been observed between the DCs, emphasizing the need for the construction of separate DCs for different vehicle classes and regions.