When Transport For London (TFL) sought a real-time emissions monitoring system to track diesel engine performance on the streets of London, they turned to their preferred supplier and trusted partner, Baumot UK. Baumot is a leading European supplier of exhaust gas after-treatment products for busses, coaches, and off-road vehicles, who selected HED’s® CANect® telematics products and services for co-development of a powerful asset tracking and performance dashboard for TFL bus fleet management.
TFL concluded that to have a real impact on improving air quality within the city limits, it required “authentic” data. It was believed that variables affecting engine performance under real operational conditions - traffic patterns, weather conditions, driver habits, etc. – would enable a much better understanding of all impacts. With Baumot devices, extensive engine performance data was already available. That data needed to relate to the performance of the operational situation. In addition, Baumot needed a partner to handle the data management and visualization.
Application
Remote monitoring of real time bus emission parameters around London to ensure accurate and live diagnostics of the diesel emission systems on busses to ensure performance over the life of the vehicle.
Challenge
To begin, we were working with an aftermarket application that required different configurations based on the bus type. In addition, we needed to create different views depending on the different needs of the users. The system also needed to be easy to use and provide the required parameters at fast intervals of 1 second for post processing.
Solution
There were two focused areas for this solution; the first being on vehicle with a Wi-Fi interface allowing the user to monitor the system status and parameters, the second being a remote portal for end-users to monitor and generate reports.
Success
According to Bobby Sohal, Baumot UK Lead Electronic Engineer on the project, “The joint collaboration between HED® and Baumot UK created a powerful data processing and acquisition device to monitor exhaust gas after-treatment systems. HEDs® open architecture, technical design and applications support allowed us to realize a unified solution, meeting the strict emissions compliance requirement set by the TFL.”
Once the companies had gathered and organized the needs of the TFL, HED®s experience in creating a functional on-vehicle interface with CANect View™ and remote back-office dashboard using CANect Portal™ enabled TFL to easily visualize the valuable data generated by the Baumot UK BNOX System.
“CANect is bringing clarity to diesel emission and trends by providing real-time monitoring and reporting with on-vehicle views and by aggregating Baumot UK data for cloud storage and post-process analysis” according to Sohal. “Together we have created a quick and easy way to identify vehicles that are not meeting emission standards along with a method to relate to the contributing operational conditions.”