VMC^® Usage Modeling

Although there is more and more monitoring data of existing vehicles in the field, knowing the future usage of a new vehicle by its group of intended users is still a challenge. The pressure of reducing emission and the corresponding need for E-mobility solutions leads to a growing diversity of vehicle concepts and corresponding user groups. Consequently, being able to model the vehicle’s usage by combining assumptions about users on an abstract level (commuter, taxi driver, city-oriented…) and information about the region, the vehicle will be operated in (urban vs. rural areas, road network, hilliness…), is an important step in the development.

Our service VMC^® Usage Modeler combines the abstract usage profile with our geo-referenced database to simulate thousands of vehicles with the usage profile given.

The Basic Approach

To each vehicle, we assign a home location and destination points for the vehicle’s drives based on the given usage profile and a random process, which generates all waypoints. A routing engine connects the waypoints to routes, representing the usage of the vehicle. A typical week, month, or year of the vehicle can be modelled like that. The process is repeated as many times as necessary to get a statistically sufficient coverage of the intended region and user group.

The underlying mathematical model is adapted and parametrised based on a questionnaire, which we provide and discuss with you before applying the model to the intended region.