Development of Operating Mode Distribution Models for Light-Duty Vehicles on Unrestricted Access Roadways

Abstract

The key correlating traffic variable for modeling vehicle emissions has evolved from average speed to vehicle-specific power (VSP), and recently to operating mode as defined in Motor Vehicle Emission Simulator (MOVES). The analysis of operating mode and its distribution, however, requires a large amount of data and is time consuming and challenging. This paper attempts to build models between the operating mode distributions and the common traffic variable—average speed—to facilitate the emission estimation. Focusing on light-duty vehicles and unrestricted access roadways, a floating car survey was conducted separately on arterials and collectors in Shaoshan, China. The trajectory data were processed to reveal the characteristics of operating mode distributions. A key finding is that, when the data points of the operating mode of idle are excluded, the VSP distributions of the remaining data points follow logistic distributions and the parameters can be linearly regressed with the average speed. Arterials and collectors feature different operating mode distributions even at the same average speed, and therefore different models were developed. The models were then applied to generate operating mode distributions, which were validated with the real-world data from the test bed and which, when compared with the default values generated by MOVES, fit the real-world condition better.