A Modularized Electric Vehicle Model-in-the-Loop Simulation for Transportation Electrification Modeling and Analysis

With the increasing number of electric vehicles (EVs), it is necessary to take their effects into account when modeling and analyzing the transportation system. Due to the unique characteristics of powertrains, not only the energy consumption model but also vehicle dynamics of EVs are quite different from internal combustion engine vehicles (ICEVs). In this paper, a modularized EV model (for both vehicle dynamics and energy consumption) is first developed using high resolution real-world data, and then integrated into the Simulation for Urban Mobility (SUMO), an open-sourced microscopic traffic simulator. The proposed model-in- the-loop simulation approach can well balance the EV model fidelity (e.g., motor efficiency map) and computational load for traffic simulation with decent scale. Based on this approach, energy impacts of two scenarios: a) EV mass adoption; and b) EV eco-driving, are evaluated as example studies. Results indicate that the differences between energy estimation from our proposed approach and that from SUMO default models may be as high as 42.5% and 5.2%, respectively, for these two scenarios.