The ZEFES coffee break: Get to know Nikhil Muthakana from HAN University

What was your original motivation to become a researcher/project manager?
“As a researcher, my job allows me to solve problems creatively and contribute to the solutions for decarbonizing the transport sector.”

What is your (main) research area today?
“Vehicle dynamics modelling and simulation, along with modelling of the real-world infrastructure. Heavy-duty vehicle automation is also an area of parallel work.”

What is the main focus of your team in ZEFES?
“Our focus is the vehicle-infrastructure interaction. Our heavy-duty vehicle models can simulate performance at critical road sections like roundabouts and highway ramps. The tools estimate whether long-haul trucks like an EMS2 can safely drive in a desired route and can provide data signals that can enhance other digital-twins, such as individual tire forces, which are absent in FMS data streaming.”

From all your activities within the project, what are you the most proud of/keen to share with the public?
“We developed a workflow that can extract the usable road width of intersections like roundabouts, to estimate vehicle maneuverability. We have also determined how our research related tooling like MATLAB can be used to generate efficient applications that can simulate the tire-road interaction, which runs orders of magnitude faster than real-time using Docker containers.”

How do you expect the ZEFES results will impact your organisation and the transport sector in Europe?
“We are excited to use the learnings in this work to strengthen our curriculum, which contains Data Science and Advanced Vehicle Dynamics related Bachelor and Master studies, distilling the learnings to the next generation. We hope that the transport sector will benefit from the prediction capabilities of our digital-twin tools.”


Project progress
Coordination

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Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Commission. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.

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