Development of driving schedules for evaluating GHG emissions

The driving schedule is a very important concept in the development and applications of EPA’s latest mobile source emission model MOVES (MOtor Vehicle Emission Simulator). The study in this work is to develop a city-specific driving schedule for evaluating greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions (specifically carbon dioxide (CO2)) from light-duty vehicles. A Genetic Algorithm (GA) is used to find the optimum driving schedules composed of a combination of microtrips selected from a pool of microtrips. A two-step evaluation process is conducted on the developed driving schedules. Evaluation results show that the driving schedules developed by the driving operating mode distribution measure result in more accurate CO2 emission estimations.