GPS Navigates the Best Route in Terms of Time, How about Sustainability?

Abstract

The transportation field has been widely regarded as one of the major sections of energy consumption producing a significant amount of air pollutants worldwide. There are approximately 1.32 billion on-road vehicles around the world, and this number seems to be doubled by the next 20 years which can result in an unsustainable development. Therefore, it is essential to pay more attention to the sustainable operation. Several navigation systems have been designed to determine the best route in terms of time, such as Google Maps; however, there are still significant problems and gaps to evaluate the best route in terms of sustainability. The main purpose of this study is to develop a method for evaluating route selection in terms of sustainability. A comprehensive framework of methodology has been developed to model the fuel consumption of vehicles as well as evaluate the sustainability of route choice. Three experimental parameters including speed, acceleration, and road slope have been identified and investigated in this study by using GPS device and engine data logger for real-world data collection. The results of experimentation show that the best route offered by current navigation systems may be not the most sustainable one. These GPS navigation systems can be updated to perform the traditional route design as well as the best route selection in terms of sustainability at the same time, and present both these two plans of route selection to the user interface for operators to determine. The core concept of this research is to make the traditional navigation systems combine with sustainability, and helps operators consider sustainability in their daily life.