The assessment of fuel reduction measures with regard to their economic efficiency for the customer is a complex issue, as the influences of the driver, vehicle environment, vehicle and driving application must be taken into account. Using the methodology presented, the development task is subdivided into the subareas of data assessment, fuel consumption simulation, economic efficiency calculation and overall concept optimization and gradually solved through reduction of the overall complexity. Once the assessment criterion is set, data is input into a vehicle model from the existing database as well as vehicle and vehicle profile parameters and broken down with regard to the energy influences occurring. The stored operating strategy and the new energy path are solved with a time-independent simulation environment. Free parameters, which are optimized with regard to the desired criterion, can be extracted for the optimization of the overall measure. The advantage of the development methodology lies, in addition to the shortened simulation time, in the assessment and optimization of numerous variants and combinations. The results of the methodology are very good for a concept assessment. Using the multidimensional performance maps, the new occurrence frequencies of the operating points can be determined during the optimization. An additional benefit here is that this information can be used by the user for manual optimizations (e.g. adjustment of ratios or similar). The methodology can be expanded in a user-defined manner for additional energetic questions. In addition to the layout of additional measures for fuel consumption reduction in ancillary components, it can also be used for designing alternative powertrains.