The UK Government’s climate change strategy has set ambitious targets to decarbonise transport. To support this the government has funded several programmes to develop new vehicle technologies and fuel/energy supply chains. To understand the performance of these new technologies there is a need for standardised tools that capture vehicle data and provide assessments of energy use that can be applied to compare energy consumption objectively. Such tools should also be capable of monitoring fleets of vehicles, to support evidence-based decision-making and strategic planning regarding the deployment of fleets employing new fuel types.
This fleet performance monitoring tool has been the focus of the Motorcade project. Motorcade has drawn on data from two hydrogen vehicle demonstration projects providing telematics data on energy consumption to develop an Azure-based VAME (Vehicle Analytics for Monitoring and Evaluation) toolkit which collates, cleans, processes and interrogates telemetry data to obtain standardised metrics for reporting performance, reported in a Power BI dashboard. The toolkit is able to compare fuel, energy (excluding energy demand due to weather), duty cycle, emissions and cost for vehicles that deploy using electric and hydrogen technologies.
