Embedded Real-Time Speed Forecasting for Electric Vehicles: A Case Study on RSK Urban Roads

Abstract

During the past ten years, worldwide efforts have been pursuing an ambitious policy of sustainable development, particularly in the energy sector. This ambition was revealed by noticeable progress in the deployment and development of infrastructures for the production of renewable electrical energy. These infrastructures combined with the deployment of wired and wireless communications could support research actions in the field of connected electro-mobility. Also, this progress was manifested by the development of electric vehicles (EV), penetrating our transportation roads more and more. They are considered among the potential solutions, which are envisaged to further reduce road transport’s greenhouse gas emissions, relying on low-carbon energy production. However, the uncertainty caused by both external road disturbances and drivers’ behavior could influence the prediction of upcoming power demands. These latter are mainly affected by the unpredictability of the electric vehicles’ speed on transportation roads. In this work, we introduce an energy management platform, which interfaces with in-vehicle components, using a developed embedded system, and external services, using IoT and big data technologies, for efficient battery power use. The platform was deployed in real-setting scenarios and tested for EV speed prediction. In fact, we have used driving data, which have been collected on Rabat-Salé-Kénitra (RSK) urban roads by our Twizy EV. A multivariate Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) algorithm was developed and deployed for speed forecasting. The effectiveness of LSTM was evaluated against well-known algorithms: Auto Regressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA), Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Convolutional LSTM (ConvLSTM). Experiments have been conducted using two approaches; the whole trajectory dataset and segmented trajectory datasets to train the models. The experimentation results show that LSTM outperforms the other used algorithms in terms of forecasting the speed, especially when using the trajectory segmentation approach.