Estimating Fuel Consumption from GPS Data

The road transportation sector is responsible for 87% of the human CO2 emissions. The estimation and prediction of fuel consumption plays a key role in the development of systems that foster the reduction of those emissions through trip planing. In this paper, we present a predictive regression model of instantaneous fuel consumption for diesel and gasoline light-duty vehicles, based on their instantaneous speed and acceleration and on road inclination. The parameters are extracted from GPS data, thus the models do not require data from dedicated vehicle sensors. We use data collected by 17 drivers during their daily commutes using the SenseMyCity crowdsensor. We perform an empyrical comparison of several regression algorithms for prediction across trips of the same vehicle and for prediction across vehicles. The results show that models trained for a vehicle show similar RMSE when are applied to other vehicles with similar characteristics. Relying on these results, we propose fuel type specific models that provide an accurate prediction for vehicles with similar characteristics to those on which the models were trained.