Simulating diesel engine performance

To determine the outcome of certain road conditions on diesel engine performance, our heavy equipment manufacturer client wanted to build an improved software tool. We built an app to simulate and measure this engine performance.

The desktop app helps with R&D and competitive sales efforts, allowing sales engineers to accurately estimate performance against competitors given certain engine and transmission configurations.

What We Did

Desktop Development

Tech Stack

VB, C#, Team Foundation

Opportunity

A Fortune 500 heavy equipment manufacturer needed a tool to simulate the performance of specific engine and transmission configurations during travel on designed routes to determine suitable route conditions. These results were used by research and development engineers and our client’s sales team. Using the results, the sales team could explain how much savings a customer could experience by switching to our client’s engine. They had a current solution in place, but it was technically disorganized and didn’t have all of the features our client needed to be successful. 

Solution

SEP proposed a desktop application to allow the customization of various travel routes to measure engine performance during simulation. This included metrics on how the engine performed in different scenarios including local vs. cross country, hills vs. flatland and city vs. highway under specific transmission configurations.

We used reverse engineering requirements and algorithms from the existing application, but cleaned up the code and introduced modern development techniques. This made the code much more maintainable and understandable for future development efforts. We then developed additional features our client needed to support the simulator, including a fuel map tool, automation tool, data import tool, and route tool.

Results

The vehicle mission simulator generates reports showing fuel economy, shifting schedules, and various engine metrics. The simulator produces accurate results, fixing data inaccuracies that our client didn’t even know they were receiving from the previous solution. Engineers use the simulator in their research and development efforts. In addition, our client’s sales team uses the system for competitive analysis of how their engines worked with various transmissions against their competitors.

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