This paper examines the prediction of energy efficiency indices of driven wheels (i.e. traction coefficient and tractive power efficiency) as affected by wheel load, slippage and forward velocity at three different levels with three replicates to form a total of 162 data points. The pertinent experiments were carried out in the soil bin testing facility. A feed-forward ANN (artificial neural network) with standard BP (back propagation) algorithm was practiced to construct a supervised representation to predict the energy efficiency indices of driven wheels. It was deduced, in view of the statistical performance criteria (i.e. MSE (mean squared error) and R-2), that a supervised ANN with 3-8-10-2 topology and Levenberg-Marquardt training algorithm represented the optimal model. Modeling implementations indicated that ANN is a powerful technique to prognosticate the stochastic energy efficiency indices as affected by soil-wheel interactions with MSE of 0.001194 and R-2 of 0.987 and 0.9772 for traction coefficient and tractive power efficiency. It was found that traction coefficient and tractive power efficiency increase with increased slippage. A similar trend is valid for the influence of wheel load on the objective parameters. Wherein increase of velocity led to an increment of tractive power efficiency, velocity had no significant effect on traction coefficient. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.