Evaluation of the impact of business on the enviroment using green accounting indexes and modern statistical methods.

To date, accounting and financial sciences have attempted to assess companies using financial ratios and other techniques that evaluate only the front office, without considering its impact on the environment. Recently, this assessment has been expanded to include new concepts, known as corporate social responsibility and social balance. These new concepts are usually viewed and studied using a multidisciplinary perspective with an aim to update the current and future value of the company. In this evolving scientific field a considerable effort has been made to objectively record and calculate the environmental impact of a company’s activities by integrating these elements into a new form of economic balance sheet. The present paper seeks to examine the presence of weighted environmental indexes and explores the process by which they can be used to evaluate a company

Estimating the CO2 Emissions Reduction Potential of Various Technologies in European Trucks Using VECTO Simulator

Heavy-duty vehicles (HDVs) account for some 5% of the EU’s total greenhouse gas emissions. They present a variety of possible configurations that are deployed depending on the intended use. This variety makes the quantification of their CO2 emissions and fuel consumption difficult. For this reason, the European Commission has adopted a simulation-based approach for the certification of CO2 emissions and fuel consumption of HDVs in Europe; the VECTO simulation software has been developed as the official tool for the purpose. The current study investigates the impact of various technologies on the CO2 emissions of European trucks through vehicle simulations performed in VECTO. The chosen vehicles represent average 2015 vehicles and comprised of two rigid trucks (Class 2 and 4) and a tractor-trailer (Class 5), which were simulated under their reference configurations and official driving cycles. The effects of aerodynamics, auxiliary systems, curb-weight, tyre rolling resistance, engine internal losses, and engine and gearbox efficiency were investigated. Factors exhibited a varying reduction potential that depended on the vehicle category and the driving cycle. Results indicate where focus should be given for improving the energy performance of trucks in view of the Commission’s future efforts to propose CO2 reduction targets for HDVs.JRC.C.4 - Sustainable Transpor

Assessment of the Measurement Methodology for CO2 Emissions from Heavy Duty Buses and Coaches

After the adoption of the CO2 Certification Regulation on the determination of the CO2 emissions and Fuel Consumption of Heavy-Duty trucks, the European Commission has decided to proceed with the preparation of a new regulatory initiative for the certification of CO2 emissions and Fuel Consumption from Buses and Coaches. The new methodology is intended to be a continuation of the Heavy-Duty Vehicles CO2 certification regulation and it will be based on a combination of component testing and computer simulation of the vehicles' Fuel Consumption. Following a request from DG-Clima, JRC launched a test-campaign in order to investigate the possibility to extend the methodology proposed for the verification of the certified CO2 emissions from Heavy Duty trucks to Buses and Coaches. In addition, the scope of the test campaign was to demonstrate the representativeness of the CO2 emissions calculations made by the official simulator (VECTO) by comparing against the actual performance of vehicles. Experiments were conducted on two Euro VI Buses, one Interurban Bus and one Coach, both on the chassis dyno and on the road, with the aim of understanding the advantages and disadvantages of different approaches proposed. The official simulation software (VECTO) was used for simulating the operation of vehicles under the different test conditions. The principal conclusion of the test campaign is that an ex-post verification method which is based on transient, on-road tests is possible also for Buses and Coaches. However, there is a clear need to work on the details of the test protocol to be finally implemented, define boundary conditions for transient tests on the road, and establish the necessary acceptance and rejection margins for any such validation. Additional care should be paid to the auxiliary components as they are a special part of Buses and Coaches and contribute highly to the overall Fuel Consumption of these vehicles. Finally, additional testing is necessary in order to calculate accurately any systematic deviation between the officially reported, simulated, CO2 values and those actually occurring in reality.JRC.C.4-Sustainable Transpor

Static Evaluation of a Wheel-Topology for an SDN-based Network Usecase

The increased occurrence of Software-Defined-Networking (SDN) not only improves the dynamics and maintenance of network architectures, but also opens up new use cases and application possibilities. Based on these observations, we propose a new network topology consisting of a star and a ring topology. This hybrid topology will be called wheel topology in this paper. We have considered the static characteristics of the wheel topology and compare them with known other topologies