The Effect of Highway Geometric Design on MinimizingVehicular Fuel Consumption

In the current era, energy supply is considered one of the most importanteconomic characteristics wich plays a key role in issues related to politics. It isclear that the world is faced with rising energy costs due to limited energyresources as well as extraction and exploitation expenditures.This paper dealswith those specified roads that are mainly related to vehicularfuel consumptionon major routes.Our focus here is to evaluate the effect of highway geometry onvehicle fuel consumption. It should be noted that factors such as weather andterrain play important roles in deciding the total vehicle emissions and fuelconsumption.This paper proposes computational methods for evaluating fuelefficiency for a given highway alignment, depending on its detailed geometriccharacteristics. A fuel consumption model is developed based on two importantconcepts: (i) variability in the amount of fuel consumed by vehicles dependingon variability in highway geometry and (ii) minimization of the fuel consumptionby ensuring conditions suitable for driving at cruising speed. The methodsestimate the fuel consumption by integrating vehicle propulsive force necessaryto maintain the cruising speed from the beginning to an end of a highway beingevaluated.A vehicle fuel consumption model which is sensitive to highwaygeometry is developed in the present study. A case study is presented todemonstrate the effectiveness of the developed method.

Keywords:

road alignments , grade , safety , Green roads , consumption of fuel