Irish researchers have created a mobile app that calculates the best route for solar-powered vehicles based on users’ time and energy efficiency preferences. The application experiment predicted the most energy-absorbing route with 51.65 percent accuracy and selected the most energy-consuming route with 86.65 percent accuracy.
Building on research into evaluating optimized routes for solar vehicles, researchers at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland have expanded the parameters used to calculate the route, improving the route’s energy use and overall utility. driver.
The researchers used the online geographic information system software ArcGIS and an open-source application interface to predict the vehicle’s solar potential by taking into account the shadow based on the surrounding topography, vehicle type, weather, distance and time of day. They implemented the model as the user’s mobile application ‘Drive Solar’, which calculates the optimal route for the user based on time and energy efficiency preferences.
The effectiveness of the prediction model was tested with a solar radiation sensor located in Dublin. The results showed that the model predicts the most energy-absorbing route with 51.65% accuracy and selects the most energy-consuming route with 86.65% accuracy.
While these show that the model can effectively predict the optimal energy-efficient route for a solar vehicle, the researchers have also highlighted some of its limitations. Namely, the accuracy of the model varies according to the weather conditions, with the most accuracy in clear skies and the lowest accuracy in medium cloudy conditions.
Noting that further research could focus on improving the accuracy of this model, the researchers conclude that “the Drive Solar application effectively implements the prediction model into a user-friendly application, so choosing the optimal route for a solar vehicle will become a widespread practice as solar vehicles are released.”
Their findings were discussed in a recent paper, “Predicting Energy-Efficient Routes for Solar-Powered Vehicles” Green energy and smart transport.
