Effect of road slope on driving cycle parameters of urban roads

This study focuses on the effect of road slope on driving cycle parameters of urban driving. A driving cycle (DC) is a series of data points that capture a vehicle's speed versus time and is a crucial factor for evaluating vehicular emission. In this study, vehicles were driven on Prishtina's urban roads with different slopes. The driving cycles for each grade class were developed using approximately 40,000 s of real-time speed data. Micro-trips were extracted using a Python-based clustering algorithm. The results indicate that the acceleration and deceleration decreased as the negative slope decreased. Drivers tended to use sharper acceleration and deceleration on uphill and downhill roads, while the lowest values of kinematic parameter values were obtained for roads with grades ranging from -2 to 2; therefore, cities with road slope values beyond this range should consider sloped roads during the development of driving cycle. Furthermore, research on CO, HC and NOx emissions related to slopes shows that for the emissions, they are more sensitive to increase from flat to uphill with respect to increasing in downhill to flat sections.