Comparison of Electric Bus Power Consumption Modelling and Simulation Using Basic Power Model, ADVISOR and FASTSim

Abstract

Modelling tools for electric vehicle power consumption simulation can range from simple, fast, less accurate models requiring few inputs to slow, highly complex, accurate models requiring many detailed inputs. Models for real-time applications like electric vehicle range estimation need near instantaneous computation time. ADVISOR and its successor, FASTSim are vehicle simulators developed by US National Renewable Energy Lab. They are sufficiently sophisticated as design tools but simulation time can be slow for real time applications. The aim of this paper is to develop a Basic power consumption Model in Simulink and benchmark its speed and accuracy against these two simulators. Real-world driving profiles obtained from experiments conducted on an electric bus were used for validation. Results show that Basic Model has comparable spread of accuracy compared to both simulators while having significantly faster computation time. It can be concluded that a Basic Model could provide sufficient accuracy for real-time application.