Development of a driving cycle for Colombo, Sri Lanka: an economical approach for developing countries

Financial constraints and lack of availability of traffic-related information significantly hinder the development of driving cycles in developing countries. This paper proposes an economical, practical, accurate methodology for the development of driving cycles, including the development of a driving cycle for Colombo, Sri Lanka. The proposed methodology captures regional traffic and road conditions and selects a model that represents the collected data sample with minimum available traffic-related information. Existing methods were modified for route selection by dividing routes into links using nodes or physical junctions to minimize the number of trips required for data collection. Speed-time data for respective links were used to reconstruct speed-time profiles of identified origin-destination pairs. The on-board method was used for data collection, and the Markov chain theory was used to develop a transition probability matrix of state changes. An additional matrix was introduced to the existing method to improve model representativeness to the collected data sample. Copyright (c) 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.