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Steadily rising energy prices and increasingly strict emissions legislation enforce the development of measures that increase efficiency of modern vehicles. An important contribution towards more efficient vehicles is the introduction of measures regarding auxiliary units. These measures increase the gross efficiency of a vehicle and therefore also the vehicle's range. Among the auxiliary power units of a vehicle like a long-haul truck, the refrigerant compressor generally consumes the biggest amount of energy. Therefore, it is reasonable to focus efficiency-increasing efforts on optimizing the A/C system. An important tool used in the development of optimization approaches is the simulation of the relevant systems. This allows a cost-optimized evaluation of the optimization approaches and also lets the engineer compare multiple variations of these approaches within a short period of time.

A significant share of the emissions of a vehicle with internal combustion engine originates from the cold start. In addition to the more stringent limits for particulate emissions due the introduction of the Euro 6c standard for gasoline engines with direct injection (GDI), exhaust gas emission testing is currently performed applying the real driving emission test procedure (RDE) required by the Euro 6d TEMP standard. The RDE test procedure is not clearly defined, potentially allowing high loads immediately after the engine start. Under such circumstances the combustion chamber features low surface temperatures impairing emission performance and in particular provoking the excessive generation of hydrocarbon and particulate emissions. It is therefore important not only to examine the heating of the catalytic converter during the cold start, but also the preconditioning of the combustion chamber itself.