Development of City-Wide Road Grade Profiles Utilising Advanced Bus Transportation Systems

Road grade is of vital importance in determining a vehicle’s fuel consumption and therefore in designing eco-routing solutions. Consequently, there is a need to develop accurate road grade profiles on a large scale with a high degree of accuracy. Advanced Bus Transportation Systems (ABTS) provide an opportunity to collect large amounts of data about bus routes in the form of GPS traces, which in turn could enable the development of road grade profiles within a large catchment area. This paper reports on an approach to developing large scale road grade profiles in a multistep process. The work investigates the use of GPS trace information from Dublin Bus, combined with elevation information from the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) to develop road grade profiles for all bus routes in the company’s system, covering the major areas of the city of Dublin, Ireland. The results are compared with road grades derived from Google elevation data.