How to calculate emissions for a routing

PTV provides the possibility to calculate emission values for routings taking vehicles and route into account. Different approaches according to various international standards are available for the calculation. These standards provide region specific factors for the determination of the emission. Currently, PTV xServer offers emission calculation basing on the following standards:

• NGA 2011/2015 (Australia): Emission calculation for transports in Australia have to be in accordance with the National Greenhouse Accounts (NGA) factors published by the Australian government.
• CEN 2011/2012 (Europe): The CEN standard EN 16258 is a European standard specifying general principles, definition, calculation methods and data recommendations, with the objective to promote standardized, accurate, credible and verifiable declarations, regarding energy consumption and emissions related to any transport service.
• CO2 Decree France 2011 (deprecated): Since 2013, all commercial transports (trucks, taxis, ships, trains, etc.) starting or ending in France have to report their CO2 emissions. In other words: a company carrying out a transport from or to France has to report their emissions.
• CO2e Decree France 2017: Since 2013, all commercial transports (trucks, taxis, ships, trains, etc.) starting or ending in France have to report their CO2e emissions. In other words: a company carrying out a transport from or to France has to report their emissions.
• COPERT Australia 1.2: COPERT Australia is designed to be used for road transport emission inventories across Australia. It is the result of a joint effort of EMISIA and the Queensland Department of Science.
• HBEFA 2.1, 3.1 and 3.2 (Europe): The Handbook of Emission Factors for Road Transport (HBEFA) was originally developed on behalf of the Environmental Protection Agencies of Germany, Switzerland and Austria. In the meantime, further countries (Sweden, Norway, France) as well as the JRC (European Research Center of the European Commission) are supporting HBEFA.
• UK DEFRA 2014: Government conversion factors for greenhouse gas reporting. These factors are suitable for use by UK based organization of all sizes, and for international organizations reporting on UK operations.

Benefits

Obtain the levels of emissions according to the various approaches and profit from the advantages:

• Verify your emission totals
• Meet legal requirements
• Choose between different calculation approaches fitting to your fleet
• Use your own average fuel consumptions or take one of the provided default value catalogs

Prerequisites

Check if the following prerequisites are fulfilled in order to use HBEFA (version 2.1 and higher) or COPERT Australia 1.2. The usage of the other standards does not require additional license keys or data.

• PTV xRoute Server and PTV map of the area for route calculation.

• License key xroute.emissions with a valid value referring to the respective emission version (31 corresponds to HBEFA version 3.1; 32 corresponds to HBEFA version 3.2 and lower. COPERTAUS12 corresponds to COPERT Australia version 1.2).

• For HBEFA and COPERT: Additional emission data are obligatory such as emission factors, global data and specific vehicle-dependent properties.

Please contact your dedicated sales partner at PTV to obtain the necessary HBEFA or COPERT data and license key.

Concept

For calculating emissions two main influencing factors are important:

• Vehicle-specific factors as for example vehicle type, fuel type, fuel consumption
• Route- specific factors like heights, distance, speed, network level etc.

 

These factors can be different from area to area; country to country or continent to continent. Therefore, area-specific data standards have been developed by various institutes and governments to provide the most suitable factor set. A lot of them are supported by PTV xRoute as shown in the introduction of this use case documentation. The data standards vary a lot, support different vehicle types, contain more or less factors and offer different result sets. If you want to meet national requirements you have to chose a suitable data standard.

As described above, vehicle- and route-specifics are needed for emission calculation. One important vehicle factor is the fuel consumption. It is treated different in different data standards. This is shown later. All other specifics are reflected in factors provided by the data standard.

In simple terms, emissions are calculated by multiplying fuel consumption values with emission factors. Depending on the chosen emission data standard for determining the emissions, consumption and factors are both included in the data or are provided separately. Two basic approaches are distinguished according to this difference:

• Comprehensive Approach
• Factor-based Approach

The Comprehensive Approach includes both, consumption default values and emission factors. Additionally, it also takes height data into account. HBEFA and COPERT Australia are standards of the comprehensive approach.

The Factor-based Approach provides emission factors. Consumption values are chosen by the user and can be based on own average fuel consumptions or different recommended consumption default values provided in this PTV xServer manual. Australia NGA 2011/2015, CEN 2011/2012, CO2 Decree France 2011, CO2e Decree France 2017 and UK DEFRA 2014 are standards of the factor-based approach.

The table shows details of the various standards. It gives information of the specific consumption values and factors which are part of the standard or are recommended for it. Besides, the relevance is shown for each standard giving information for which countries the standard is published. Information about the required PTV license keys, data and PTV xServer version can also be found in this table:

The calculation of emissions depends on the above mentioned standards and the combination of vehicle parameters described as follows. The parameter "average fuel consumption" serves as input for company specific consumption values and needs to be set if factor-based standards are used. Incorrect combinations of vehicle parameters might lead to falsified results, or various exceptions could be thrown. PTV recommends validating the API (especially the class description about vehicle parameters) before setting the specific characteristics.

Further Information

The following use cases demonstrate the emission calculation with either the comprehensive or factor-based approach:

• How to calculate emissions with comprehensive approaches.
• How to calculate emissions with factor-based approaches.

Copyright © 2024 PTV Logistics GmbH All rights reserved. | Imprint