Fuel consumption prediction of fleet vehicles using Machine Learning: A comparative study

Ability to model and predict the fuel consumption is vital in enhancing fuel economy of vehicles and preventing fraudulent activities in fleet management. Fuel consumption of a vehicle depends on several internal factors such as distance, load, vehicle characteristics, and driver behavior, as well as external factors such as road conditions, traffic, and weather. However, not all these factors may be measured or available for the fuel consumption analysis. We consider a case where only a subset of the aforementioned factors is available as a multi-variate time series from a long distance, public bus. Hence, the challenge is to model and/or predict the fuel consumption only with the available data, while still indirectly capturing as much as influences from other internal and external factors. Machine Learning (ML) is suitable in such analysis, as the model can be developed by learning the patterns in data. In this paper, we compare the predictive ability of three ML techniques in predicting the fuel consumption of the bus, given all available parameters as a time series. Based on the analysis, it can be concluded that the random forest technique produces a more accurate prediction compared to both the gradient boosting and neural networks.