VECTO: Vehicle Energy Consumption Calculation TOol

What is VECTO?

VECTO is the offical vehicle simulator developed by the European Commission to certify & monitoring energy demands, fuel consumption & CO₂ emissions from Heavy Duty Vehicles (HDVs).

VECTO is a downloadable executable program written for .Net (C# & VBasic for the GUI) designed to operate on a single computer.

The purpose of VECTO's repository at code.europe.eu is to facilitate the communication between the Commission and VECTO's development team with its users, to streamline support related issues contributing to the development, review, and dissemination of VECTO.

EU Policy

From the 1st of January 2019, it is mandatory to certify CO₂ emissions for all new truck vehicles of categories 4, 5, 9 and 10, as foreseen by regulation 2017/2400/EU and related legislation. Data determined with VECTO along with other related parameters, are monitored and reported to the European Commission and made publicly available for each of those new trucks.

Installation

VECTO is distributed as a portable application, downloaded from "Deployments" | "Releases releases" (or from the latest release-badges at the top of the landing page). This means you can simply unzip the distributed archive and directly execute it.

Requirements

• Microsoft Windows PC running Microsoft Windows 7 or later
• Microsoft .NET Framework 4.5

Procedure

Installing VECTO requires the following two steps:

1. Copy the VECTO directory and all its files and subdirectories to the appropriate location where the user has execute permissions (e.g. inside C:\Program Files or ask your system administrator).

2. Edit the file install.ini and remove the comment character (#) in the line containing:

   ExecutionMode = install

Note: If the ExecutionMode is set to install, it is necessary to copy the generic VECTO models distributed with VECTO to a location where you have write permissions, as VECTO writes results into the same directory of the input job file.

Usage

Five different mission profiles for trucks and five different mission profiles for buses and coaches have been developed and implemented in the tool to better reflect the current European fleet.

The inputs for VECTO are characteristic parameters to determine the power consumption of every relevant vehicle component. Amongst others, the parameters for rolling resistance, air drag, masses and inertias, gearbox friction, auxiliary power and engine performance are input values to simulate energy consumption and CO2 emissions on standardised driving cycles.

Launch the ./User Manual/help.html file in your browser (included in the distributed archive) and read it for further usage instructions.

The trailer branch

For a later regulation, the VECTO GUI has been extended for bodies and trailers, where only the relevant data has to be entered (total mass, RRC of the tyres and air drag changes compared to the standard body or trailer). Also vehicle VIN, some technology information and certainly the manufacturer, production date etc. can be entered to produce a VECTO result file complete for certification. For bodies from rigid lorries, also the Primary vehicle Information File (PIF) has to be loaded to VECTO, which has to be provided by the manufacturer of the primary vehicle. For trailers and semi-trailers, VECTO allocates the generic data automatically.

You may download the Generic Truck/Trailer 3D shapes for CFD simulations from the ECoGeT 3D shapes project.

Related vecto software

In the vecto group you may find additionally:

• Vecto Airdrag: certify C_d·A values from constant speed tests
• Vecto Engine: certify engine declaration XML files as VECTO input
• Vecto EEA hashing-tool: (archived) monitoring-aid for European Environment Agency
• Vecto Git: (unused) cirtify any pre-processing file