Impactful Driving Performances for e-Bus Service Operations: Assessment Through Virtual Environment

The strong technical development of Electric Vehicles (EVs) is capturing mobility interests to delve with the energy transition. Despite the technical improvements are increasing the overall performances of EV subsystems, when deploying a public transport service the effect of driving style can play a critical component for the daily energy consumption and charging schedule. This paper presents an assessment of driving performances regarding the operational public service of electric buses by means of a virtual environment. The analysis is founded on a wide set of travelling data acquired remotely, then processed through a virtual e-Bus model developed in Matlab-Simulink. This approach allows to decouple sideways contributions impacting the overall energy consumption, thus isolating the human-related factors. Results show that the variability of energy consumption based on driving styles can be considerable among different drivers during the same daily shift considering the same bus line, reaching maximum values of +36%. For Transport Operators deploying e-Buses for public service, this leads to range reduction for each vehicle. A valuable countermeasure can be acting on training drivers thus to put into practice informed decisions for drivers, thus to reduce extra-consumption and extending the range of e-Buses.