Vehicle parameters

Characteristic

Short description

In recent years, alternative engine types have seen their market share rising with vehiclesClosed The term vehicle describes what is being routed or planned for. Vehicles are used in route calculation, distance matrix calculation and effectively also in tour planning. In route calculation, vehicle properties like overall size, weight and speed are in focus. In tour planning, it is vehicle properties like capacity and availability. Commonly a vehicle is motorized, like a truck - including its trailer or a car. However also a bike or even a pedestrian are included in this definition. supporting new alternative energy sources, whether combustion based engines with newer fuel types as Liquified Natural Gas (LNG), Hybrid vehicles combining electric and combustion energies or purely electric vehicles based on battery or fuel cell technologies.

Since xServer 2.27, PTV xRoute suppports the definition of vehicles with alternative engine types, whether they are combustion, hybrid or purely electric.

Use

In order to define an alternative engine, the user can select from the available engine types: COMBUSTION, HYBRID or ELECTRIC. Depending on the chosen engine type, several other vehicle parameters must be defined to better match the vehicle specific configuration.

Detailed Consideration

Vehicle configuration

In addition to traditional combustion-based engines, the user can select either hybrid or electric engine types. Depending on the chosen engine type, some more parameters are required to better determine the vehicle configuration. These parameters can be set directly through the request engine api definition. If the vehicle contains inconsistencies or irrelevant parameters, a ResultLimitation will be returned for each of the affected parameters, see here for details.

Required parameters

Depending on the engine type a vehicle specification requires additional parameters to be specified. These are as follows:

What is more, the fuel types CNG_GASOLINE and LPG_GASOLINE require the dualFuelRatio to be specified, and these fuel types are only allowed for engineType COMBUSTION.

The bioFuelRatio is supported only for the fuelTypes DIESEL, GASOLINE, ETHANOL, CNG_GASOLINE or LPG_GASOLINE. For ETHANOL, the bioFuelRatio is mandatory and should be greater than 0.

Whenever such an inconsistency is present, a ParameterInconsistencyLimitation will be returned, no matter if the missing parameter is actually required to calculate the response or not. We recommend always to specify a complete vehicle, otherwise results like emissions, toll, or the monetary cost report may be incomplete or contain wrong results.

Ignored parameters

When specifying a parameter not supported by the engine type, an IgnoredParameterLimitation will be returned. This limitation has no effect on the response, but the parameter in question should be removed from the request.

Engine parameters

In the following table, we summarize the engine types and their according engine parameters supported values.

Engine Parameter/EngineType COMBUSTION HYBRID ELECTRIC
fuelType All values except NONE All fuel types except NONE, CNG_GASOLINE and LPG_GASOLINE NONE
electricityType NONE All values except NONE All values except NONE
bioFuelRatio Any value comprised between 0, 100 (inclusive), only if fuelType is DIESEL, GASOLINE, ETHANOL (except 0), CNG_GASOLINE or LPG_GASOLINE Any value comprised between 0, 100 (inclusive), only if fuelType is DIESEL, GASOLINE or ETHANOL (except 0) 0
hybridRatio 0 Any value comprised between 0, 100 (exclusive) 0
dualFuelRatio Any value comprised between 0, 100 (exclusive), only if fuelType is either CNG_GASOLINE or LPG_GASOLINE 0 0
fuelConsumption Any value greater than 0 Any value greater than 0 0
electricityConsumption 0 Any value greater than 0 Any value greater than 0
emissionTechnology All values All values NONE
particleReductionClass All values All values NONE
particleFilterInstalled true/false true/false false
emissionStandardEU All values All values NONE
emissionStandardAustralia All values All values NONE
cylinderCapacity Any value greater than 0 Any value greater than 0 0

Weight parameters

There are parameters for the actual weight and the permitted weight of the whole vehicle:

To ensure the consistency of the weight parameters a result limitation is returned if the actual weight is larger than the permitted weight or if the total (legally) permitted weight is larger than total technically permitted weight.

Fuel Consumption

The engine fuelConsumption denotes the effective fuel consumed by the vehicle per 100km. Depending on the fuelType, it should be expressed in the following units :

Engines that can operate using a mixture of two different fuels are called dual fuel engines. In xRoute, LPG_GASOLINE and CNG_GASOLINE are supported along with the dualFuelRatio. This ratio denotes the consumption of CNG/LPG fuel type from the total amount of the vehicle consumption per 100km.

For LPG_GASOLINE, the fuel consumption should be given as l/100km and can be computed as following :

For CNG_GASOLINE, the fuel consumption should be given as kg/100km and can be computed as following :

Good to know

Limitations

If any engine parameter does not satisfy the requirement denoted in the above table regarding the engine type, the xRoute function calculateRoute will add either one of the following result limitations:

While the IgnoredParameterLimitation can be ignored, the ParameterInconsistencyLimitation should be resolved as it may lead to result issues, especially for emissions.

Support

Alternative engine types are currently only relevant for emission calculation.