Automotive demonstrator

Intelligent transport challenges addressed

Today, public transport companies are facing a growing set of constraints, including legal, environmental and economic constraints, in addition to the need for improving service to passengers. Hence public transport operators are seeking to improve their productivity and quality of service with new applications and intelligent solutions. Application integration using embedded electronics solutions is seen as one of the levers to face the multi-facetted challenges of public transportation in an effective and efficient manner. Such solutions should facilitate the scalability of services, as well as the interoperability of applications such as ticketing, information to passengers, geo-localization, fleet management, driver assistance, fuel consumption optimization, …, and ensure overall cost-effectiveness.

However, the offers currently available on the market are heterogeneous and mostly proprietary; they are not easily interoperable, thus hindering any smooth evolution and scalability of the necessary services required to address the operators’ growing constraints. The heterogeneity and fragmentation of today’s market offerings are obstacles to the effective deployment of suitable solutions; in addition, current offers are complex, expensive to implement and to maintain.

The automotive demonstrator developed by Geensys in cooperation with external partner RDTL (Régie Départementale de Transport des Landes) pioneers a novel approach, based on an open platform called E-nove.

Its high-level objective is to provide the infrastructure for creating on-demand transport solutions, in which vehicle circulation is driven by user demand rather than by fixed schedules and fixed routes.

This demonstrator primarily focuses on the embedded computing infrastructure.

Overview of the E-nove platform
An E-nove enabled system consists of a central station, a set of stops and a set of vehicles, each vehicle being capable of communicating with the central station and with each stop.

The E-nove system is built upon an open hardware and software platform (the E-nove platform) which can host various transport/mobility information exchange applications required by market stakeholders.

Hardware platform: Each vehicle will be equipped with an embedded PC platform with a touch-screen. This PC will be connected to sensors and actuators, on board of vehicles, and will be able to communicate wirelessly with the central station and with each of the stops.

Software platform: On the software side, two major standard technologies are used:
• Using the Eclipse Equinox reference implementation, the platform incorporates OSGi in order to facilitate dynamic downloading and upgrading of services; i.e. an Eclipse based library will provide mode management for Java based applications (“bundles”) as well as access rights and configuration service management.
• Web Services, in particular DPWS, are used for communications between the embedded platform applications and the central station and the stops. They support remote configuration and upgrade of bundles and applications.

Advantages brought by SODA
The SODA DPWS stack, implemented in Java, is part of the software platform.
• DPWS's dynamic discovery capability will facilitate establishing the contact between a vehicle and the central station or a stop,
• DPWS's eventing capability will enable asynchronous event notifications between a vehicle and the central station.
• Management capabilities implemented on top of DPWS through WS-Management will allow configuration, monitoring and supervision of the embedded resources.
• Secure information exchanges will be enabled by the security technologies developed in the SODA project.

E-nove applications will be defined in two different, but complementary ways:
• using WSDL to define Web Service interfaces,
• using OSGi to define all interfaces provided to and required by other Java bundles.

Interface code is automatically generated; the application developer just needs to write his/her Java application code.

Anticipated business-level benefits of the E-nove platform: 
Through the standardisation of an open software architecture platform, the E-nove platform intends to pursue the following high-level objectives.
• Decrease costs of ownership: installation, operation and maintenance
• Allow interoperability between equipment items and applications
• Offer more services and ease application adaptation for public transport exploitation companies
• Facilitate evolutions of systems and applications, facilitate re-use
• Allow suppliers to focus on applications, which bring added value, instead of on hardware and software infrastructures
• Enable suppliers to access other markets in their own country, in Europe, and ultimately worldwide