New methodology for developing driving cycle(s) for Sri Lanka; case study, Colombo, Sri lanka

Abstract

Even though driving cycles have been adopted around the world in different type of applications, the data needed for each steps is costly and time consuming. Majority of the Developing countries do not have systematic data bases for traffic related information such as origin-destinations, vehicle kilometers, average annual daily traffic etc. for majority of road links. Meager amount of available data is not sufficient to develop a driving cycle. Even though the data is collected, significant effort has to be made to construct a driving cycle that closely matches to the population data set. This paper gives simplified methodology for developing driving cycles using different approaches for route selection, data collection and cycle construction. For the route selection the available methods have been combined together and modified to suit for developing countries where no details traffic flow information will be available. Also a method was adopted for data collection by dividing selected routes in to links and grouped them according to daily traffic to optimize the cost for data collection. Road links were divided using physical junctions on the road and routes were selected using traffic generators and attracters combined with Origin Destination data. Also methodology was developed for synthesize data population using collected data from road links. Another issue for cycle construction is to construct a cycle which is close to population parameters. Using existing methods many cycles have to be constructed until the acceptable cycles is generated. New methodology has been adopted to develop driving cycle to match the population parameters and then to select data for driving cycle using Markov chain. As a case study Colombo, Sri Lanka has selected to apply the new approach of driving cycle construction for developing countries.