Abstract

Incorporating Road Grade Into a Vehicle Aggressiveness Algorithm
Track: Transportation
Authors: Sera White

Plug-In Hybrid Electric Vehicle (PHEV) technology is a relatively new research area. The U.S. Department of Energy's Advanced Vehicle Testing Activity (AVTA) performs most of the PHEV fleet-based research. Currently, AVTA has performed the largest PHEV data collection effort in the world, logging over 3,000,000 PHEV miles. AVTA provides fleet managers, vehicle drivers, and the public with summary reports that detail monthly performance characteristics of the PHEV fleet. This research uses AVTA PHEV data to determine the effectiveness of incorporating road slope into a tractive effort algorithm that characterizes vehicle aggressiveness. Road slope was calculated using the publicly available USGS National Elevation Dataset. This paper discusses the effectiveness of incorporating slope into the tractive effort calculation as well as the methodology for obtaining millions of elevations from the USGS NED web service.