Thesis work: Estimating Installed Engine Population
Göteborg, SE, 417 15
Transport is at the core of modern society. Imagine using your expertise to shape sustainable transport and infrastructure solutions for the future. If you seek to make a difference on a global scale, working with next-gen technologies and the sharpest collaborative teams, then we could be a perfect match.
About us
Volvo Penta is a world-leading supplier of engines and complete power systems for marine and industrial applications. Volvo Penta has developed a global leadership and one of the industry’s strongest brands.
Background:
Volvo Penta sells engines through OEMs, importers and dealers across more than 200 countries. Once an engine leaves the factory we often lose sight of it: it may be built into a machine, exported, resold and operated for two decades without us ever seeing it again. Only a minority of the fleet is connected, and connectivity is unevenly distributed across markets.
Thesis work objective:
This thesis aims to investigate how publicly and commercially available external data sources can be used to estimate the installed population of industrial engines per market, and to validate and improve internally derived population estimates.
The focus is on identifying which external sources exist, assessing their reliability and coverage, and developing a transparent method for combining them with internal data, including a principled way to handle disagreement between sources.
Expected Outcomes:
• Source inventory: a documented, maintainable catalogue of external sources, with coverage, granularity, cost and reliability assessed for each.
• Triangulation method: a transparent, reproducible method for combining sources into a market-level estimate with stated uncertainty.
• Validation study: an applied comparison against internal estimates for selected markets, with analysis of discrepancies and their causes.
• Recommendation: a prioritised proposal for which sources to invest in, and how to integrate them into ongoing analytics.
Qualifications and Personal Profile
We are looking for master's students in Data Science, Industrial Engineering and Management, Statistics or other relevant fields. We value:
• Comfort working with incomplete, inconsistent and contradictory data, and the judgement to reason about what a number actually represents.
• Working knowledge of Python or R, and of statistical estimation and uncertainty.
• Curiosity and persistence in tracking down information
Key Responsibilities:
• Identify and map the external data sources relevant to off-highway and industrial engine populations, spanning public, regulatory, commercial and industry-analyst sources.
• Assess each source on coverage, granularity, update frequency, cost and reliability.
• Design and implement a method for triangulating multiple sources into a population estimate per market, with explicit uncertainty.
• Validate the method against internal Volvo Penta data and analyse where and why sources disagree.
• Investigate what external data can contribute to estimating engine survival and service life.
• Recommend which sources Volvo Penta should acquire, subscribe to or monitor.
Benefits:
• Hands-on experience with real, messy, global industrial data in a leading global company.
• Collaborate with data scientists, market analysts and business stakeholders worldwide.
• Contribute to an underexplored methodological area, with academic as well as practical value.
Ready for the next move?
Contact:
Bettina Linder, Change Lead AI Transformation, bettina.linder@volvo.com
Katarina Floberg, Data Analytics Lead, katarina.floberg@volvo.com
Last application date: October 30
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Who we are and what we believe in
We are committed to shaping the future landscape of efficient, safe, and sustainable transport solutions. Fulfilling our mission creates countless career opportunities for talents across the group’s leading brands and entities.
Applying to this job offers you the opportunity to join Volvo Group. Every day, you will be working with some of the sharpest and most creative brains in our field to be able to leave our society in better shape for the next generation. We are passionate about what we do, and we thrive on teamwork. We are almost 100,000 people united around the world by a culture of care, inclusiveness, and empowerment.
Volvo Penta, a world-leading supplier of engines and complete drive systems for marine and industrial applications, you will be part of a global and diverse team of highly skilled professionals who works with passion, trust each other and embraces change to stay ahead. We make our customers win.