Case study

Shell Eco-marathon widens its horizons HP HAVEn brings technical data to life and analyses social media

IndustryTechnology/Education

ObjectiveVisualise telemetry data, allowing this to be shared with visitors and assess social media sentiment in real-time

ApproachWorked with HP, as official Global Innovation Partner, to determine the most appropriate solution

IT matters• Enables the real-time visualisation of multiple

data feeds, transforming the visitor experience

• Allows organisers to explore and serve data, quickly and efficiently, improving event management

• End-to-end solution delivered in less than eight weeks

Business matters• Delivers analysis of social media sentiment,

allowing organiser to better engage

• Provides the means to collect, manage, combine, analyse and display meaningful data beyond the event site, potentially engaging a larger audience

• Enables teams and public to intuitively visualise course metrics and team performance live

“HP technology is central to the success of Shell Eco-marathon. Working together, HP used the HAVEn platform for Big Data to create a richer experience for both visitors, teams and their followers.” – Norman Koch, technical director, Shell Eco-marathon

Focus on energy innovationShell Eco-marathon is a global series of events for design and engineering students. Each event requires the capture, sharing and visualisation of large amounts of event and car telemetry data. Under the HP HAVEn Big Data umbrella, the structured data is managed and analysed using HP Vertica; HP Explore analyses social media sentiment in real-time. Visualisations are created using a next generation agile development platform. All information is deployed on the HP Public Cloud.

Case study | Shell Eco-marathon

Challenge

Innovation and collaboration Motorists who complain about the cost of fuel may only dream of a car that will travel the equivalent of 3,300 kilometres on one litre but a team of French students has developed a concept car that will do just that. The Microjoule designed and built by students from St Joseph La Joliverie, Nantes is 33 times lighter than the average family car and was just one of the entries in the latest Shell Eco-marathon.

The competition dates back to 1939 when Shell Oil employees in the USA made a friendly wager over who could travel furthest on the same amount of fuel. Aimed at inspiring the engineers of the future, Shell Eco-marathon now runs on three continents and challenges student teams to design, build and test ultra-energy-efficient vehicles. Over 3,000 students in 400 teams took part in the 2014 season and the culmination of their efforts were three events held in Manila, Houston and Rotterdam where they drove their vehicles round a city centre track to see who could go the furthest on the least amount of fuel.

“The aim is not speed – though cars must travel at a minimum of 25km/hour,” says Norman Koch, technical director, Shell Eco-marathon. “Instead, Shell Eco-marathon wants to see which vehicle can travel furthest using the least amount of energy. We have teams who come back year after year and this really is a showcase for students to create and collaborate on future technologies.

“In our first year, the winning team was getting 680km per litre of petrol, this year the winning team got over 3,300km per litre. To put it into perspective, that’s like travelling from Oslo to Athens on one litre of petrol.”

Each event involves a serious amount of logistical planning. There are more than 300 staff on site and everything the organisers need must be brought to the site, unpacked, used, then repacked and shipped out.

“An F1 weekend has 24 cars but we have more than 200,” says Koch. “Again, rather like F1, the event is more than the race itself and the potential audience is larger than the people on site. We have tens of thousands of people attending, but we also have team supporters around the world wanting to follow the progress. A lot of data is generated by testing and live track performance and we wanted to open it up so everyone could feel part of the event. There are up to 200 teams at each event and 30 on the track at any given moment. Before they qualify to race, teams must pass a 10-step scrutineering stage, with over 100 technical details on the check-list. We create a large amount of data, and teams and supporters are hungry to see this.”

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Case study | Shell Eco-marathon

The organisers needed a way to collect and analyse this data and then make it available to followers. To give a wider dimension to the contest, they also wanted to engage with social media. Both the teams and the public need intuitive, live insights on the course and teams’ performance.

Solution

Real-time accessHP became the official Global Innovation Partner of Shell Eco-marathon 2014 providing HP Helion Public Cloud computing capacity. It also provided HP ElitePad 900 tablets, laptops and printers to technical teams inspecting the vehicles and publicised the event through HP channels.

The problems of how to make the most of the event and telemetry data, broaden the audience participation and better engage with social media were handed over to an HP team specialised in analytics services and they investigated how HP HAVEn could be brought into play. HP HAVEn is a platform comprised of software, services and hardware and is designed to collect both structured and unstructured data from many sources and then analyse it.

For the first time, the 2014 series took advantage of HP HAVEn data analytics platform which enables them to quickly manage and analyse massive volumes of data.

Working with a solution architect from HP Analytics & Data Management, a specially-created solution was designed, using HTML5 and JavaScript, to track each vehicle. Sensors in each vehicle collect data on track location, fuel efficiency, number of attempts, speed, and more and this data is collected on the HP Helion Public Cloud in the Vertica real-time analytics database. The results are visualised on large screens, tablets and via a web interface in real-time using a next generation agile application platform.

And to give even more dimension to the contest, HP Explore software was delivered from the cloud through Software-as-a-Service to track social media mentions, particularly on Facebook and Twitter. HP Explore is a visual analytics platform that integrates with HP IDOL (Intelligent Data Operating Layer) from HP Autonomy to take advantage of its unique capacity to connect to and index information from over 1,000 file types and hundreds of distinct repositories and data sources. These range from Twitter to Microsoft® Exchange to SQL and HP Explore uses this capability to provide a comprehensive search and analytics solution that unifies the data.

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Case study | Shell Eco-marathon

© Copyright 2014 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P. The information contained herein is subject to change without notice. The only warranties for HP products and services are set forth in the express warranty statements accompanying such products and services. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting an additional warranty. HP shall not be liable for technical or editorial errors or omissions contained herein.

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Benefits

Information sharing HP HAVEn allows for a two-stream treatment of data. HP Vertica makes the most of the telemetry data generated at the event, and allows Shell to broadcast this data and HP Explore monitors live social media commentary.

“HP technology is central to the success of Shell Eco-marathon,” says Koch. “HP Vertica allows us to collate and visualise the most relevant data and HP Explore lets us engage. Together they create a richer experience.”

“We want our technicians to have the best access to data, but it’s also important that the student teams see and share the latest information. It’s part of the theatre of the event. The technology we use at the event needs to be as innovative as the student vehicles.”

Future events are likely to see greater integration of live data and viewer commentary using different technologies combined under the one HP banner. HP already works with NASCAR, the US motorsport organisation, to collect, display and react to live social media data. Shell and HP are looking at ways of extending the project, marrying the data from competitors to social media and broadcast feeds.

Learn more at hp.com/go/autonomy

Customer solution at a glance

Hardware• HP Helion Public Cloud

Software• HP HAVEn • HP Vertica • HP Explore

HP services• HP ES Analytics and Data Management