Charging or refuelling needs - The next phase

Governments do not have adequate data on HGV movements in Scotland. To understand where future charging and fuelling infrastructure will be needed, we need to work with road haulage operators to understand how HGVs currently move through Scotland. This tells us where infrastructure should sensibly be located en route.  The Heriot Watt research team combine this data so that no individual company’s information can be deduced from the model outputs. We use your company’s data as input to our models to find out the most critical re-charging/ refuelling points for the Scottish road network. Look at our latest report to see what we have learned from the data we have received so far.

Most fleets in Scotland will take a while to shift to electric or hydrogen, and one of the key questions of most operators is whether there will be the refuelling/ charging infrastructure to meet their needs.  This project needs to learn about ALL HGV journeys in Scotland so that infrastructure can be planned to help everyone to move more quickly to zero emission freight.

Data will be shared with the research team on a secure server owned by Heriot-Watt University. The server has satisfied cyber essential criteria (the evaluation report can be provided upon request). The data will only be accessible to the named researchers working on the project and essential IT staff of Heriot-Watt. Any data identifiers that could be linked to an individual company will be replaced with generic identifiers (e.g. vehicle registration numbers would be replaced with ‘vehicle 101’). Companies can do this before sharing the data, or we will ‘clean’ it in that way before using it. The data from all participating companies will be combined in the model, after removing any company identification. It will not be possible to identify details of any contributor’s operations from the model outputs. Outputs will be checked to ensure that commercially sensitive information is not inadvertently disclosed.

By sharing data, companies will initially contribute to a clearer national response to support decarbonisation. By contributing data to the project, you are increasing the chances that future energy infrastructure networks will be in the locations that will meet the needs of your operation.

As fleets consider their investments in decarbonisation, they need some assurances that the re-fuelling/ recharging infrastructure will be in place to support operations. Some larger operators are considering investing in warehouse/depot charging, and some will have to rely on shared facilities, whether publicly available or shared commercially. These strategic choices currently have high levels of uncertainty and risk. The modelling work that Heriot Watt is doing can be tailored to respond to specific queries from business partners to inform those choices, but this is not an output of this phase of the project for Transport Scotland. If your company is interested in more bespoke modelling for your needs, this could be considered separately from this project. By joining the project, you can learn, free of charge, what our models can tell you.

No. This work is being undertaken for Transport Scotland as a national initiative, and the outputs will be publicly available without charge.

The project outputs will include maps and spreadsheets showing the most nationally critical points for refuelling/recharging infrastructure and their relative importance, based on the combined demand of those fleets that contribute their data. Outputs are checked to ensure that no commercially sensitive information is inadvertently released. No company specific data will be identifiable in any of the outputs. See our latest report to confirm this for yourself.

At its simplest we want to know the start and end points of the journeys your trucks take and when they travel these routes.  Our ideal format is vehicle tracking data, specifically a .csv file containing dates, times and locations (latitude and longitude) of, for example, ignition on/off events, along with vehicle identifiers (e.g. registration number).  A separate file listing depots/destinations is also useful.  Alternatively, we can also use routing and scheduling data.  The more complete the data set is, the more accurate our modelling will be, but we can make estimates based on more limited information.

Sharing information such as total annual payload transported between start and end point and the fleet profile is also helpful.

If your existing data systems provide just some of the information we need, it would still be helpful to us, so please contact us at cls-info@hw.ac.uk

Ideally, we would like one year’s worth of data, but it doesn’t have to start at any particular time of year. If you don’t have a full year of data, we can make some guesses from a shorter time period, but that will be less accurate. If you can share sample data from different seasons in a year we can work with that (for example, a one week sample from each of low season, normal season and high season) .

The most recent data is best, but if that is too sensitive for you to share, we can work with older data (maximum five years old). We’d like to avoid data sets over the period when normal schedules were disrupted due to the pandemic (e.g. between March 2020 and March 2021).

We can accept your data as soon as you’re willing to share it with us, as we are already building the model. Our first report has been published and  our modelling work will continue. A further report will be published in 2025, based on any data received before December 2024. Please do get in touch with us if you are willing to share data.

We would ideally like the data in a tabular format. An Excel spreadsheet or .csv file would be ideal but we can work with other formats (EXCEPT pdf or images).

We can take data in any format and clean it ourselves if you don't have time to meet our specifications. Messy data is better than no data!

Data can be transferred using SharePoint or a proprietary Dropbox account. For security reason sharing data though email or google drive should be avoided. Please email us at cls-info@hw.ac.uk and we’ll share with you a secure link for transferring your data.

This work is for Transport Scotland, but obviously many of the trucks in Scotland come from other parts of the UK. Our refuelling/ charging infrastructure has to meet the needs of all fleets operating in Scotland. If you share with us your UK wide data, then we can have a better view of the fuelling/charging needs within Scotland. We are only really interested in those journeys that come into Scotland or through Scotland (e.g. from Northern Ireland and then into England) If you share a larger data set, we can clean it out to include only the information relevant to this study, or you can choose to share only the journeys that are in Scotland.

We are interested in all types of HGVs including specialist trucks. Light vans and cars are not part of this study.

We know that there is a lot of research being conducted in freight refuelling demand, and we are trying to liaise with all the research groups doing this across Scotland. The picture is fragmented, as some are working at local or regional levels, and we’re reaching out to as many as we find. We won’t share your data with others beyond this project, unless you give us explicit permission to do so, and the same applies to other researchers. We treat your data with confidentiality. If you have shared your data with another research project and wish them to share it with us, then please let us and them know, so that we can connect.

Please email cls-info@hw.ac.uk with any questions. A member of our research team will respond to you directly.