Probabilistic Graphical Modeling of Use Stage Energy Consumption: A Lightweight Vehicle Example¹

Although energy consumption during product use can lead to significant environmental impacts, the relationship between a product's usage context and its environmental performance is rarely considered in design evaluations. Traditional analyses rely on broad, average usage conditions and do not differentiate between contexts for which design decisions are highly beneficial and contexts for which the same decision may offer limited benefits or even penalties in terms of environmental performance. In contrast, probabilistic graphical models (PGMs) provide the capability of modeling usage contexts as variable factors. This research demonstrates a method for representing the usage context as a PGM and illustrates it with a lightweight vehicle design example. Factors such as driver behavior, alternative driving schedules, and residential density are connected by conditional probability distributions derived from publicly available data sources. Unique scenarios are then defined as sets of conditions on these factors to provide insight into sources of variability in lifetime energy use. The vehicle example demonstrates that implementation of realistic usage scenarios via a PGM can provide a much higher fidelity investigation of use stage energy savings than commonly found in the literature and that, even in the case of a universally beneficial design decisions, distinct scenarios can have significantly different implications for the effectiveness of lightweight vehicle designs.