A Distributed Service Delivery Platform for Automotive Environments: Enhancing Communication Capabilities of an M2M Service Platform for Automotive Application
Full version: Access restricted permanently due to 3rd party copyright restrictions. Restriction set on 11.04.2018 by SE, Doctoral CollegeThe automotive domain is changing. On the way to more convenient, safe, and efficient vehicles, the role of electronic controllers and particularly software has increased significantly for many years, and vehicles have become software-intensive systems. Furthermore, vehicles are connected to the Internet to enable Advanced Driver Assistance Systems and enhanced In-Vehicle Infotainment functionalities. This widens the automotive software and system landscape beyond the physical vehicle boundaries to presently include as well external backend servers in the cloud. Moreover, the connectivity facilitates new kinds of distributed functionalities, making the vehicle a part of an Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) and thus an important example for a future Internet of Things (IoT).
Manufacturers, however, are confronted with the challenging task of integrating these ever-increasing range of functionalities with heterogeneous or even contradictory requirements into a homogenous overall system. This requires new software platforms and architectural approaches. In this regard, the connectivity to fixed side backend systems not only introduces additional challenges, but also enables new approaches for addressing them.
The vehicle-to-backend approaches currently emerging are dominated by proprietary solutions, which is in clear contradiction to the requirements of ITS scenarios which call for interoperability within the broad scope of vehicles and manufacturers. Therefore, this research aims at the development and propagation of a new concept of a universal distributed Automotive Service Delivery Platform (ASDP), as enabler for future automotive functionalities, not limited to ITS applications. Since Machine-to-Machine communication (M2M) is considered as a primary building block for the IoT, emergent standards such as the oneM2M service platform are selected as the initial architectural hypothesis for the realisation of an ASDP. Accordingly, this project describes a oneM2M-based ASDP as a reference configuration of the oneM2M service platform for automotive environments.
In the research, the general applicability of the oneM2M service platform for the proposed ASDP is shown. However, the research also identifies shortcomings of the current oneM2M platform with respect to the capabilities needed for efficient communication and data exchange policies. It is pointed out that, for example, distributed traffic efficiency or vehicle maintenance functionalities are not efficiently treated by the standard. This may also have negative privacy impacts. Following this analysis, this research proposes novel enhancements to the oneM2M service platform, such as application-data-dependent criteria for data exchange and policy aggregation. The feasibility and advancements of the newly proposed approach are evaluated by means of proof-of-concept implementation and experiments with selected automotive scenarios. The results show the benefits of the proposed enhancements for a oneM2M-based ASDP, without neglecting to indicate their advantages for other domains of the oneM2M landscape where they could be applied as well
