On the Use of Biofuels for Cleaner Cities: Assessing Vehicular Pollution through Digital Twins and Machine Learning Algorithms

Abstract

The air pollution caused by greenhouse gas emissions, particularly carbon dioxide (CO2), is a significant environmental concern that impacts air quality and contributes to global warming. The transportation sector plays a pivotal role in this issue, being a major contributor to CO2 emissions. In light of this situation, this article proposes a methodology that utilizes a supervised learning algorithm to estimate CO2 emissions and compare vehicles fueled with ethanol and gasoline. Additionally, the solution adopts an online, unsupervised machine learning algorithm to identify data outliers and improve the confidence in the results. Furthermore, this work incorporates the concept of digital twins, using virtual models of vehicles to carry out more extensive pollution simulations and allowing the simulation of various types of vehicles and the modeling of realistic traffic scenarios. A supervised machine learning approach was adopted to infer emission data in the model, allowing more comprehensive and meaningful comparisons between real-world and simulated measurements. The performed analyses of pollution emissions for different speeds and sections of routes demonstrate that CO2 emissions from ethanol were significantly lower than those from gasoline, favoring more sustainable fuels even in combustion engine vehicles. Adopting cleaner fuels is perceived as crucial to mitigate the negative effects of climate change, with plant-based fuels like ethanol being crucial during the transition from fossil fuels to a more sustainable vehicular landscape.