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Current vehicles, especially the electric ones, are complex mechatronic devices. The pickup vehicles of small sizes are currently used in transport considerably. They often operate within a repeating scheme of a limited variety of tracks and larger fleets. Thanks to mechatronic design of vehicles and their components and availability of high capacity data connection with computational centers (clouds), there are many means to optimize their performance, both by planning prior the trip and recalculations during the route. Although many aspects of this opportunity were already addressed, the paper shows an approach developed to further increase the range of e-vehicle operation. It is based on prior information about the route profile, traffic density, road conditions, past behaviour, mathematical models of the route, vehicle and dynamic optimization. The most important part of the procedure is performed in the cloud, using both computational power and rich information resources.

The paper describes a simple simulation tool for determination of vehicle energy consumption under dynamic conditions, suitable for early stages of design and linked to other tools being developed inside Vehicle concepts modeling (VECOM) project framework. The simulation tool is based on ordinary differential equations and a dynamic expandable library of vehicle component features. It describes vehicle dynamics in longitudinal direction and the appropriate efficiencies of engine, transmission and accumulation components (if used). All required data may be obtained by targeted simulations using multi-dimensional methods or by experiments. The simplified algorithms finding the best usage of powertrain chain efficiency in dependence on required pre-defined operation conditions (real driving record or a driving test cycle) were established.