*1.2. Goals and Scope*

Even though the feasibility of multispeed gearboxes has been previously studied for EVs and fuel cell vehicles, the feasibility of this concept for ECBs has not been investigated before. A separate feasibility study is required, since the driving cycles, vehicle structure and powertrain design of an ECB are different by definition from that of an EV. This study seeks to contribute to the literature by providing answers to the following research questions:


A simulation model is constructed to study these three aspects of feasibility. The simulation model considers longitudinal dynamics and hence speed, voltage and current signals from real-world operation were measured from a prototype ECB operating in the city of Espoo, Finland. The signals were collected with 1 Hz sampling rate on all driving cycles. The collected dataset presents an opportunity to evaluate the feasibility of a multispeed gearboxes in real-world conditions. The availability of representative driving cycles is considered a valuable contribution in this work, since in previous research standard driving cycles have been used extensively, as described in the previous section. The standard driving cycles are appropriate estimates of driving behavior but cannot capture the complexities and variation of real-world driving. A detailed explanation of the data is provided in Sections 2.4 and 2.5.

Considering new vehicle design, it would be worthwhile to take into account the interaction between the installed two-speed gearbox and the electric motor configuration. The simulation and optimization models developed in this work are in a general form, supporting motors of different sizes, so they can be applied to the motor sizing problem as well although this is not directly addressed in this work.
