Rare Consulting, a division of infrastructure consultancy pitt&sherry, is working with the NSW government's Roads and Maritime Services (RMS) agency to build an evidence bank demonstrating the performance of environmental technologies.
"Over the last few years, a lot of companies with light and heavy vehicles in NSW have been looking at how they can cut back on energy consumption," said Rebecca Williamson, consultant with Rare/pitt&sherry.
"Despite this," she says, "relatively little has been done to evaluate and document the real-world economic and environmental performance of heavy vehicle technologies in Australia. Overseas programs have looked at these issues—but differences in factors such as road conditions and vehicle types mean that Australia can't necessarily apply the results of overseas trials and presume the outcomes will be similar."
A steering group representing eleven stakeholders (including Boral Transport, Murray Goulburn Co-operative, Star Track and several government agencies) has set the aims for the partnership to (a) independently test technologies that claim to improve the environmental performance of heavy vehicles, and (b) give fleet operators a credible research foundation on which to base their purchasing decisions. Heavy vehicle fleets across Australia can participate in trials.
"Sourcing participants from fleets already trialling a particular technology not only helps the partnership to build a library of real-world case studies," said Ms Williamson, "but provides the trial fleets with a robust evaluation of the trial technology, which they may not have undertaken otherwise."
The Partnership liaises with fleets to develop and operate trials, devises data collection methodologies, analyses the data according to agreed protocols, and writes case studies that report on the effectiveness of each technology trialled.
Data from each trial is collected via 'loggers' fitted into participating trucks' engine management systems. The loggers wirelessly transmit data to an online platform. Ms Williamson and her colleagues can log into this platform remotely to watch the data accumulate in real time, although the data logging provider also sends daily aggregates for each truck. The data collection can run for as long as four months, which provides a solid bank of data, while allowing time to evaluate the data thoroughly and write the case studies.
A key to a successful and reliable trial is to ensure that the vehicles operate under similar conditions during the baseline and the test periods. To ensure this is achieved, Ms Williamson and her colleagues undertake 'before and after' mapping. This tracks each truck's engine load and speed variance over the course of a day, to make sure it is doing exactly the same thing when the technology is in use, as when it is not.
Rare/pitt&sherry uses agreed criteria to analyse the data from each trial and write the case study; providing further assurance that the results presented accurately reflect the differences between the technologies and/or vehicles trialled.
Given the complexity of technologies trialled, and the need to ensure an absolutely robust comparison, each trial can take many weeks or months to establish. Ten trials have been completed and published on the RMS website since the first round took place in 2010.