5 min read

How digital twin technology helps you size, test and refine your HDV charging infrastructure plan.

When you plan your electric charging infrastructure, you need to strike the right balance between the level of initial investment and the actual needs of your fleet. Get the balance wrong, and you risk over-spending on underused assets or under-investing in infrastructure that cannot satisfy your long-term requirements.

At Mitsubishi Electric, we help you make these decisions with confidence. Our digital twin simulation tool allows us to model, test and refine your charging infrastructure before a project begins on the ground.

By creating a virtual replica of your depot, complete with vehicle movements, charging schedules and power demand, we can test different scenarios and build an infrastructure plan that precisely fits your operational needs today – and in the future. Then, you can invest in the right way, without uncertainty or incorrect assumptions.

Scale is one of the hardest elements to define during the transition to electric charging. To help you make the most of your budget, you need to accurately size the infrastructure for both your present and future needs.

Our simulation tool helps you find the right answer. By feeding it accurate, up-to-the-minute operational data, we can create and test different versions of your plan to find the best fit between current needs and future ambitions.

Through a collaborative, iterative process, we’ll explore how your depot performs at different budget and capacity levels, seeing in real time how each option affects power consumption, vehicle availability and overall cost.

This exercise will help you:

• Select the right charging equipment for your fleet profile and duty cycles
• Decide how to stage your investment
• Evaluate trade-offs between upfront costs and long-term capacity planning

You may even choose to scale down initial infrastructure investment to keep costs manageable in the short term. Our tool helps you visualise how a smaller setup will perform over time and for how many years it will remain effective. In other cases, building more capacity from the start may deliver better lifetime value. The goal in either case is to create a clear and coherent plan based on data-driven insight.

Once we have carried out our analysis, we’ll give you a detailed report that recommends your optimal sizing based on your strategic plan and budget. We can include insights into how to evolve your infrastructure over time to support its long-term utility.

Our simulation tool provides a detailed, visual reference for your entire electric vehicle charging setup, right down to charger positioning, vehicle movements, and energy flow. This granular clarity helps stakeholders from across your business visualise and understand the plan, making it easier to secure internal alignment and budget approval.

You can continually hone and specify your plan before deployment, accurately modelling and measuring factors such as:

• Personnel requirements, including the number of jockeys you’ll need
• Labour and operational costs
• The impact of future fleet expansion or changes to operating hours

By testing how the depot will perform under different operational conditions, you can anticipate potential bottlenecks or inefficiencies long before any ground is broken.

Fleet electrification is a significant financial commitment for any business. Our simulation tool makes that liability more predictable and less daunting.

You can evidence why your chosen approach will work, backed by technical analysis and operational data. With us as your partner, you can validate that your infrastructure can support your intended charging strategy and that both are aligned to your long-term objectives.

Knowing that your plan is fit for purpose and not over- or under-engineered reduces the risk of the investment and provides a benchmark by which to model and monitor performance.

This insight supports you in the long term as you can see where charging infrastructure may become under optimised against your benchmarks, providing the basis for future development of new, more efficient approaches. It’s planning and management without the guesswork – removing much of the risk from your electrification roadmap.

The simulation tool is only one part of our end-to-end approach to HDV fleet electrification. We support businesses through every stage of the journey, from defining the initial plan through to deploying infrastructure and managing day-to-day operations.

Planning is the foundation of success, but also where uncertainty is highest. By combining our technical expertise with digital twin technology, we make your initial discovery and planning process clearer, faster and more reliable. You can move into deployment confident that your plan is verified and tested, your investment levels are sound, and your future operational needs are mapped out.

Fleet electrification shouldn’t be a leap of faith. With the right tools, you can make informed choices, control your costs, and create a charging infrastructure that can support a growing fleet.