Coupling a traffic microsimulation with an emission model is a means of assessing fuel consumptions and pollutant emissions at the urban scale. Dealing with congested states requires the efficient capture of traffic dynamics and their conditioning for the emission model. Two emission models are investigated here: COPERT IV and PHEM v11. Emission calculations were performed at road segments over 6 min periods for an area of Paris covering 3 km 2. The resulting network fuel consumption (FC) and nitrogen oxide (NOx) emissions are then compared. This article investigates: (i) the sensitivity of COPERT to the mean speed definition, and (ii) how COPERT emission functions can be adapted to cope with vehicle dynamics related to congestion. In addition, emissions are evaluated using detailed traffic output (vehicle trajectories) paired with the instantaneous emission model, PHEM. COPERT emissions are very sensitive to mean speed definition. Using a degraded speed definition leads to an underestimation ranging from-13% to-25% for fuel consumption during congested periods (from-17% to-36% respectively for NOx emissions). Including speed distribution with COPERT leads to higher emissions, especially under congested conditions (+13% for FC and +16% for NOx). Finally, both these implementations are compared to the instantaneous modeling chain results. Performance indicators are introduced to quantify the sensitivity of the coupling to traffic dynamics. Using speed distributions, performance indicators are more or less doubled compared to traditional implementation, but remain lower than when relying on trajectories paired with the PHEM emission model. Highlights • The mean speed definition has a considerable impact on COPERT FC and NOx emissions, even at the network scale. • COPERT functions are adapted to richer traffic information (speed distribution). • Modeling chain comparison: traffic microsimulation is paired with PHEM and COPERT.
Although emission models have been designed using vehicle data over driving cycles of a few minutes, they are often applied at large scale to estimate total emission (inventories). In between, there is a range of scales in use in traffic and environmental studies (road sections, sub-areas, etc.). Coupling a traffic microsimulation with COPERT emission factors at different scales reveals scaling biases. We compare network fuel consumption (FC) and nitrogen oxide (NOx) emissions resulting from emission calculations based on different spatial decompositions. The results show that for an area of Paris covering 3 km 2 , the differences due to the aggregation scale for emissions range from 5 to 17% depending on the pollutant, spatial partitioning and traffic conditions. These discrepancies can be reduced using a distance-weighted mean speed, which is not a scaleconsistent definition of mean travel speed. They can almost be cancelled by using a correction term derived analytically in this paper, thus consistency can be guaranteed between emissions assessed at different scales. Finally, a case study shows that it is possible to evaluate FC and NOx emissions on a large-scale network from a sample of traffic data (probes), and obtain the corrective term to be applied to remove scaling bias. The most critical step is the accurate estimation of the total travel distance. The gaps were successfully reduced to a maximum of 8% in congestion for a penetration rate of about 20%.
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