Encouraging Greener Transportation

Introduction

Our Researchers in Residence activity is part of our Academic Engagement Programme and develops new collaborations through research visits/residencies for university academics to spend time embedded within the Catapult teams to build stronger partnerships in the national innovation system and supporting the best environment for innovation such as development of green mobility.

This project is being undertaken by Dr Zaili Yang from Liverpool John Moores University and focuses on Prioritising Vehicle Cleanliness for Better Air Quality.

Background

Despite much effort on vehicle emission control in the past decade, the air quality situation in the UK needs to be further improved.

Fleet conversion to real zero emission technologies is too slow to just wait for all vehicles on the road to be replaced by electrified ones. It is therefore necessary to address practical solutions to reduce the impact of the existing internal combustion fleet. One solution is to provide incentives to, and at the same time, guide customers who purchase new vehicles by making their cleanliness visible.

Solution

This project aimed to develop and support a testing and scoring mechanism, to assess and publish a green vehicle index. This index would encompass all of the relevant criteria affecting consumer choice, for example CO² and polluting emission, energy efficiency, performance, cost, with the aim to create competition on who brings to market the cleanest vehicles.

To achieve this, the relevant criteria were first identified through the hybrid of literature review and surveys, involving buyers, manufacturers and transport authorities.

Advanced multi-criteria decision making techniques were investigated to understand their capability and qualitative features with the best then applied to combine the performance scores of different vehicles against the defined criteria to demonstrate who are cleaner and better in overall performance.

The project helps to reduce emissions from the existing combustion-engine fleet by providing more information to guide buyers about the cleanest available vehicles.