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Economic impact of the use of inertia in an urban bus company

Abstract:

Public transport companies face great expenses. In order to be profitable companies, they need to reduce costs in all aspects. In addition, many countries have increased taxes to force transport companies to reduce their fuel consumption and, thus, greenhouse effect emissions. Efficient driving is the cheapest way to achieve this goal. In this paper, we analyze the economic impact of one of the most influential efficient driving techniques in an urban bus company. We calculate the difference of consumption between a well-performed deceleration using the inertia of the vehicle and a loss of speed obtained by using the brakes. For this purpose, we compare a real track performed by any driver in a precise vehicle with a simulated ideal track. To obtain the deceleration of the simulation, we develop a linear regression model on over 170,000 samples captured from the same vehicle over a period of one month. The results show that the costs of the vehicle under test in one month may be reduced by more than 2500 € by using this technique. With these results, we can see that it is worth trying to anticipate different situations while driving only by applying inertia adequately.