Physics-guided Energy-efficient Path Selection Using On-board Diagnostics Data

Given a spatial graph, an origin and a destination, and on-board diagnostics (OBD) data, the energy-efficient path selection problem aims to find the path with the least expected energy consumption (EEC). Two main objectives of smart cities are sustainability and prosperity, both of which benefit from reducing the energy consumption of transportation. The challenges of the problem include the dependence of EEC on the physical parameters of vehicles, the autocorrelation of the EEC on segments of paths, the high computational cost of EEC estimation, and potential negative EEC. However, the current cost estimation models for the path selection problem do not consider vehicles’ physical parameters. Moreover, the current path selection algorithms follow the “path + edge” pattern when exploring candidate paths, resulting in redundant computation. Our preliminary work introduced a physics-guided energy consumption model and proposed a maximal-frequented-path-graph shortest-path algorithm using the model. In this work, we propose an informed algorithm using an admissible heuristic and propose an algorithm to handle negative EEC. We analyze the proposed algorithms theoretically and evaluate the proposed algorithms via experiments with real-world and synthetic data. We also conduct two case studies using real-world data and a road test to validate the proposed method.