Abstract: The generally upward trend in gasoline prices over the past 10 years has prompted renewed interest in studying the viability of hybrid and electric automobiles in the years ahead. The vehicle power consumption depends on many factors among which the most notable ones are road design characteristics, traffic congestion, and driver behavior. The amount of fuel or battery consumption, which is a measure of vehicle power uses, depends on such factors as vehicle acceleration/deceleration, road configuration, and driver behavior.
In this presentation we formulate vehicle power uses as a function of traffic and road design characteristics, i.e., Vpu(i)=f(V,T,G), where Vpu is vehicle power uses for the ith vehicle class, V is a vector representing vehicle characteristics, T is a vector representing traffic characteristics, and G is a vector representing geometric characteristics of roadways. Using traffic and roadway data from a congested highway network in the Baltimore area we calculate the vehicle power uses for different vehicle classes, traffic, and road conditions. We then study the power consumption requirements of some hybrid and electric vehicles and relate that to the traffic and roadway characteristics, which will be a key factor in designing future hybrid and electric vehicles. We perform some sensitive analysis to investigate the impact of vehicle, traffic, and geometric characteristics of roadways on vehicle power uses. The preliminary results indicate that older vehicles, higher levels of traffic congestion, and aggressive driving behavior generally require higher vehicle power uses which in turn requires higher fuel and battery consumption. Additional testing will be carried out in future works. This project was funded through the Department of Energy-Massie Chairs of Excellence Program at the Morgan State University.

Brief Biography of the Speaker:
Dr. Manoj K. Jha is Professor and Founding Director of the Center for Advanced Transportation and Infrastructure Engineering Research (CATIER) in the department of civil engineering at the Morgan State University, Baltimore, MD, USA. His research interests are in developing computational models for sustainable transportation infrastructure design and route optimization. For his scholastic and research achievements he has received several awards, among which are the 2010 best paper award by the Transportation Research Board (TRB) for the paper entitled "Methodology for Checking Shortcomings in the Three-Dimensional Alignment," presented at the 4th International Symposium on Highway Geometric Design, Valencia, Spain on June 2, 2010; 2008 National Science Foundation (NSF) Small Technology Transfer Research (STTR) award; 2005 and 2006 United Negro College Funds Special Program/Department of Defense (UNCFSP/DoD) Faculty Development Awards; 2005 Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Summer Faculty Research award by the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) Center of Excellence, University of Maryland, College Park, and 2005 NSF-PASI-TS (National Science Foundation's Pan-American Advanced Study Institute on Transportation Sciences) award by the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
Dr. Jha has authored (or co-authored) more than 120 peer-reviewed articles in journals, books, and conference proceedings in the highway design, infrastructure, optimization, and transportation literature. He has also co-authored 3 books and co-edited 14 books. He is an associate editor of the Open Civil Engineering Journal, and editorial board member of several international journals, including the Journal of Infrastructure Systems, and the International Journal of Operations Research and Information Systems. He has delivered over 20 invited, keynote, and plenary speeches at international conferences and institutions.