A forecasting system for car fuel consumption using a radial basis function neural network

A predictive system for car fuel consumption using a radial basis function (RBF) neural network is proposed in this paper. The proposed work consists of three parts: information acquisition, fuel consumption forecasting algorithm and performance evaluation. Although there are many factors affecting the fuel consumption of a car in a practical drive procedure, in the present system the relevant factors for fuel consumption are simply decided as make of car, engine style, weight of car, vehicle type and transmission system type which are used as input information for the neural network training and fuel consumption forecasting procedure. In fuel consumption forecasting, to verify the effect of the proposed REF neural network predictive system, an artificial neural network with a back-propagation (BP) neural network is compared with an RBF neural network for car fuel consumption prediction. The prediction results demonstrated the proposed system using the neural network is effective and the performance is satisfactory in terms of fuel consumption prediction. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.