PTV Group - Logistics Forum

Cheers,

as you know PTV's routing engine enables you to deal with emission calculation. Here's a collection of URLs that could be helpful in this context: We distinguish between two major approaches.

Approach	comprehensive	Factor based
Example	HBEFA (Europe), Copert (Australia)	Cen 2012 (Europe), Defra 2014 (UK), CO² Decree 2017 (France), NGA Factors 2015 (Australia)
Concept	Comprehensive emission calculation approaches contain default values for fuel consumption and factors for calculation. As user no own consumption data has to be added.	Factor-based calculation approaches contain factors for emission calculation. Users have to enter their own consumption data. Default values for consumptions are provided in this use case description.
Elevations?	Comprehensive approaches consider the elevations, i.e. driving uphill produces output that differs from the downhill version.	Factor-based calculation approaches do not consider elevations.

Technically spoken you can request emission information based on

• complete route
• per leg
• per segment

Showcases

• Comprehensive Emissions
• Factor based emissions

Integration samples

• In general
• Comprehensive approach
• Factor based approach

API elements

• RequestBase.VehicleProfile : specify physical characteristics of a vehicle - might be relevant due to the chosen approach, e.g. the VehicleProfile.Engine.
• RouteOptions.EmissionOptions : The emissions for different fuel consumption scenarios. Only those scenarios will be returned for which the corresponding request parameter is set.
• RouteOptions.EffectiveFuelConsumptions : The attributes for calculating CEN or factor-based emissions. The response element contains only those scenarios for which the corresponding request parameter is set.
• ResultFields.Emissions. In the same way use LegResultFields and SegmentResultFields to get data on a more detailed level.
• Output: Emissions

Feel free to return to me if you need more info!

Furthermore I recommend to care fo the following bullets:

• TourOptimization: Emission calculation is based on xRoute. It is not part of xTour or any other xServer module.
• Coverage of current standards? Though xRoute 1 supports the calculation of emissions you should be aware that newer standards such as latest HBEFA 4 or later will probably no longer be integrated into xRoute 1.
• Reporting versus Optimization: Emission calculation is proceeded AFTER the routing process itself (during the so called "listing" step), therefore it is not part of a routings target function. "Minimize emissions" is not possible by design - you may ensure to compute a short or fast track but the Emission will be derived from the calculated route.
• Detail levels: Emissions can be calculated based on a whole route, per leg or even per segment (ridiculous if you ask me). If you want to partition the emissions to the freight ("this single palette with 64 cradles of beer produced ... during its transport from Barcelona to Warszaw...together with 5t of other goods") you needd to do this on your own. There's no standard metric for this!
• Does emission calcultion consider elevations? That depends on the standard you apply: HABEFA 3.1 and COPERT consider the elevations, i.e. driving uphill differs from downhill.
• What is the difference between CO2 and CO2e? In the context of emission calculation some standards return CO2 (e.g. EmissionValueScenario_FRENCH_CO2_DECREE_2011_1336) while others mention CO2e (e.g. EmissionValueScenario_FRENCH_CO2E_DECREE_2017_639). There's a small difference between CO2 and CO2e: While CO2 completely refers to Carbon Dioxide the CO2e also considers other substances for which a so-called "equivalent" is computed. "Equivalent" means that the emitted amount of that substance produces "the same damage to the environment" than the reference volume of Carbon Dioxide. Be careful not to mix this up. You can recognize this by the name of a type or property.

Bernd

PS: Feel free to check this article about CEN approaches, too. It contains an overview of the different fuel scenarios.

Update 5.3.2021 - added this extension to the main thread...

Furthermore I recommend to care fo the following bullets:

• Emission calculation is based on xRoute. It is not part of xTour or any other xServer module.
• Also xRoute 1 supports the calculation of emissions. But be aware that newer standards such as latest HBEFA will probably no longer be integrated into xRoute 1.
• Emission calculation is proceeded AFTER the routing process itself (during the so called "listing" step), therefore it is not part of a routings target function. "Minimize emissions" is not possible by design - you may ensure to compute a short or fast track but the Emission will be derived from the calculated route.
• Emissions can be calculated based on a whole route, per leg or even per segment (ridiculous if you ask me). If you want to partition the emissions to the freight ("this single palette with 64 cradles of beer produced ... during its transport from Barcelona to Warszaw...together with 5t of other goods") you needd to do this on your own. There's no standard metric for this!

Update: just added some sample requests and responses in JSON

Update 17.8.2021: added this to thee bullet list:

• What is the difference between CO2 and CO2e: in the context of emission calculation some standards return CO2 (e.g. EmissionValueScenario_FRENCH_CO2_DECREE_2011_1336) while others mention CO2e (e.g. EmissionValueScenario_FRENCH_CO2E_DECREE_2017_639). There's a small difference between CO2 and CO2e: While CO2 fompletely refers to Carbon Dioxide the CO2e also considers other substances for which a so-called "equivalent" is computed. "Equivalent" means that the emitted amount of that substance produces "the same damage to the environment" than the reference volume of Carbon Dioxide. Be careful not to mix this up. You can recognize this by the name of a type or property.

Question: What is the minimum parameter set required for proper emission calculation?

Answer: Depends on the standard you want to use. For CEN calculation (and any factor-based emission calculation), we only need the type of fuel and the average fuel-consumption. In general there's more info on which parameters are needed if you take a look at the use cases part, in the documentation (xserver1/ xserver2 (comprehensive/factor)).

For HBEFA, there is the list of the needed parameters.
For factor-based calculation, it is not really detailed, but as I just said, we need the fuel type and the consumption.

Thanks to Yann for the details,
Bernd