Longitudinal Passability and Energy-Feasibility Screening of Mountain Routes for Powered Off-Road Wheelchairs

This paper presents a scalable first-order framework for screening mountain routes for powered off-road wheelchairs by combining dense route geometry with a one-dimensional longitudinal energy model. Dense traces sampled at approximately 1 m resolution (∼10,000 km of routes in Poland) were reprojected to a metric coordinate reference system, smoothed in elevation, split at discontinuities, and analyzed with 3-, 10-, and 30-m grade windows. The resulting descriptors capture maximum uphill and downhill grades and the length of continuous steep sections, which are interpreted relative to wheelchair-specific screening profiles to assign segment-level passability classes. The same segmented representation is processed by an energy-feasibility layer that includes gravitational and rolling loads, aerodynamic drag, drivetrain losses, controller current and power limits, and a Thevenin-equivalent battery with open-circuit voltage and state-of-charge tracking. In this framework, controller constraints are not treated only as diagnostic flags: a feasible-speed check allows current, power, and voltage saturation to affect the route-level decision directly. Because the available route traces do not directly include cross-slope, surface roughness, traction, or surface-dependent rolling resistance, these factors are handled as explicit limitations and as sources of scenario-based uncertainty rather than inferred deterministically from longitudinal geometry alone. The preprocessing yielded 1,024 valid routes and 1,055 continuous sections in the database. On a length-weighted basis, the green passability share ranged from 44.26% to 69.75%, and the mean predicted energy demand under the adopted baseline vehicle parameter set was 40.56 Wh/km. The integrated output distinguishes geometrically blocked routes from geometrically passable but energetically risky cases. The framework is intended as a transparent screening and prioritization tool for route recommendation and future field calibration, not as a substitute for field inspection or fully validated safety assessment.