Recent changes to the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards in the United States mandate substantial improvement in automobile fuel economy over the next fifteen years. One of the ways that manufacturers improve fuel economy is to lower vehicle weights, which has impacts on safety. The innovation of this project is a novel maximum likelihood model that avoids issues of driver selectio...

Modern vehicles, as an emerging smart mobile platform, are equipped with operating systems to help or even replace human drivers [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]. The computational capabilities provide opportunities and challenges to manage and control vehicles safer and more fuel efficient. Morgan Stanley reports that 100% adoption of self-driving cars is expected to have $158 billion annual savings [6] is US....

This paper presents a method for increasing fuel economy using traffic data and a model predictive controller. Using knowledge of the traffic ahead, a vehicle can react to changes in traffic density or speed before they happen, increasing the efficiency of a trip and providing valuable information to the driver. In particular, the traffic information is used to determine a time-varying velocity...

This paper proposed an integrated system between an eco-driving algorithm and an eco-signal control based on vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication, and evaluated the system’s environmental benefits. The system calculates eco-speeds using vehicle information (e.g., current locations, vehicle speeds, and acceleration profiles) and signal information. In addition, the system controls current s...

We use naturalistic driving data to analyze the refueling behavior of drivers. The data come from a year-long study in which drivers were provided with experimental vehicles to use for seven weeks. We use data logged during the experiment to identify the time and location of refueling stops. With this dataset, we estimate a discrete choice model for the driver’s choice of refueling location. We...

A technology has been devised and recently deployed in highway vehicle transportation to protect vehicle fuel tanks from impact-induced fires. The technology is currently employed in the FIRE Panel product, which exhibits an improved design based upon powder panel technology used for decades to protect military aircraft from ballisticinduced fuel tank-fed fires. The device comprises a shallow s...

This paper presents an ecological (eco) driving system based on prediction of the preceding vehicle using model predictive control. At any measured road-traffic states it computes the optimal vehicle control input using the models of the vehicle dynamics and fuel consumption. The prediction model the preceding vehicle is formulated based on experimentally obtained driving data. The proposed sys...

Advances in alternative fuel technologies and increasing motor vehicle fuel efficiency may result in a decline or flattening of demand for conventional fuels in the U.S. in the coming decades. One outcome of this development maybe a reduction in state and federal income from motor fuel taxes, the primary source of funding to maintain and improve the transportation infrastructure. To keep pace w...

Vehicle Emission is one of the main causes of environmental damage. Vehicle engines produce carbon dioxide (CO2), hydrocarbon (HC), Nitrogen oxides (NOx) and many other harmful substances. An investigation was conducted using a compression-ignition engine fuelled with different ratios of blends of diesel and biodiesel at different EGR rates. The effects of different ratios of fuel blends and EG...

Vehicle platooning has in recent years become an important research field for the vehicle industry. By establishing a platoon of heavy duty vehicles, the fuel consumption can be reduced for the follower vehicles due to the slipstream effect. However, as vehicles are scattered on the road driving by themselves, coordination amongst the vehicles is required. In this paper we study the problem of ...