Development of a Driving Cycle to Characterize the Driving Behaviour of Two-wheelers and Threewheelers in Colombo Metropolitan Area

As a result of the rapid motorization, fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions have become two of the major concerns in the context of contemporary vehicular industry. In order to achieve the targets set by the sustainable development goals, most of the local authorities have imposed stringent limitations on both energy consumption and emissions of vehicles, which need to be adhered to by the respective manufacturers. When defining the limitations, having a proper benchmarking tool is of paramount importance. In this context, one such significant and reflective tool is the driving cycle, which can be defined as the representative time speed profile of selected vehicle categories within a defined geographical scope. Besides few attempts of developing a local driving cycle for Sri Lanka, there is a clear gap to be addressed in terms of developing a more reflective local driving cycle. This paper converges its focus into the route selection, data collection, driving cycle construction and the validation of the representative driving cycle. The geographical scope is selected as the Colombo Metropolitan area. A representative driving cycle is developed having a time length of 1215 seconds, an average speed of 3.87 m/s and an idle time percentage of 12.75%.