Review Reports - An Algorithm to Predict E-Bike Power Consumption Based on Planned Routes

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The introduction is strongly focused on the useful (practical) element of the proposed solution, but lacks a scientific overtone. The authors did not specify the research problems, goals and research hypotheses. The article is a presentation of the solution, however, only in practical terms. The results are not compared with other methods widely presented in the literature. It is not known how the presented proposal looks compared to other solutions. Maybe the final results do not differ significantly? Maybe the use of many variables and complex models does not bring significant results? The results themselves (which the authors also emphasize) and the number of trials performed are also questionable. The whole thing seems to be only the preparation for research that may be published in the future.
The drawings are large and look unattractive in the text. Moreover, in my opinion, not all of them are needed. The article feels more like an instruction.

In the ending, there is again no reference to science. It should refer to the problems, goals and hypotheses that should be included in the introduction. The article requires rewriting to be a scientific item, not an instruction or a simple case study without a scientific element.

Author Response

Replies to reviewers of the paper electronics-1625133

Dear editor,

we have received the comments of the reviewers and we have spent an effort to address them in order to improve the paper.

In the following we report the comments of each reviewer with our answers in italic.

In the paper we have highlighted the major modifications in red (except the content of the tables).

We hope that our rework can meet reviewers’ expectations and can make the paper interesting for the publication.

Best regards

Reviewer 1

We agree that the Introduction did not point out the scientific overtone in a clear way. We have reworked the introduction to better explain the scientific aspects of our approach. We have also clarified this in the abstract.

The article is a presentation of the solution, however, only in practical terms.

Our aim was to propose a mathematical model and to show a concrete implementation of it. This reviewer’s comment made us improve the balance of the paper.

The results are not compared with other methods widely presented in the literature. It is not known how the presented proposal looks compared to other solutions. Maybe the final results do not differ significantly? Maybe the use of many variables and complex models does not bring significant results?

It is difficult to compare our proposals with other works, because they have different goals, different approaches or different scopes. Other proposals have mainly the goal of forecasting the battery consumption in given or predefined paths, they exploit mainly machine learning techniques and they do not let the biker choose a new path. Our proposal instead can forecast the battery consumption in whatever path, applying the mathematical model without the need for existing data.

Of course a direct comparison would be interesting, but we point out that there are substantial differences that make such a comparison hard and possibly not useful.

The results themselves (which the authors also emphasize) and the number of trials performed are also questionable. The whole thing seems to be only the preparation for research that may be published in the future.

We were aware that more tests are needed to validate the results. However, our aim is not to provide a large number of results, rather we aim at presenting the model, its implementation and some results supporting it.

The drawings are large and look unattractive in the text. Moreover, in my opinion, not all of them are needed. The article feels more like an instruction.

We have reworked the figures to aggregate the screenshots. We are aware that some are more relevant than others, but we aim at presenting the complete implementation. Any punctual suggestion about them is useful.

In the ending, there is again no reference to science. It should refer to the problems, goals and hypotheses that should be included in the introduction. The article requires rewriting to be a scientific item, not an instruction or a simple case study without a scientific element.

As mentioned, we have reworked the Introduction to better point out the scientific aspects of our work.

Reviewer 2

This paper presents an algorithm to predict e-bike power consumption. The paper is well organized.

Thank you for the positive comment.

However, some revisions could be considered to improve the paper, as follows:

In the introduction, a table to summarize the related works could be make the readers to understand the state of the art

We have added a table in Section 1.1 to summarize the analyzed related work.

The authors should consider or discuss the possibility to implement the developed application to the existing e-bike sensors system foi a real-time application.

This is a very good suggestion, which we have taken into consideration. We have already contacted some companies but with no success. A first step could be to connect our application with the e-bike sensors, as described in the Future work Section. We have added a sentence in the section.

The developed application requires a user to enter several parameters, which are difficult to be measured by the user/people. Authors should discuss how to handle such problems.

We agree with the reviewer; to this purpose we have enabled the choice of an e-bike model, which defines all the values of the e-bike, and we have defined some default values. We have explained this at the beginning of Section 2.

The experimental results are too short and no graphics or tables are given. Therefore it is difficult to be understood clearly.

We agree that a summary of the results can make them clearer. We have added two tables (Table 2 and Table 3) to this purpose.

Reviewer 2 Report

This paper presents an algorithm to predict e-bike power consumption. The paper is well organized. However, some revisions could be considered to improve the paper, as follows:
1. In the introduction, a table to summarize the related works could be make the readers to understand the state of the art
2. The authors should consider or discuss the possibility to implement the developed application to the existing e-bike sensors system foi a real-time application.
3. The developed application requires a user to enter several parameters, which are difficult to be measured by the user/people. Authors should discuss how to handle such problems.
4. The experimental results are too short and no graphics or tables are given. Therefore it is difficult to be understood clearly.