Thesis work - Smart Automotive Telemetry (Data Collecting) System

ACTIA Department:

System Engineering, Software Engineering

About ACTIA

ACTIA Nordic AB is a leading designer and manufacturer of vehicle communication equipment. Through the years, ACTIA has delivered communication and diagnostics solution to customers such as Volvo Cars, Jaguar Land Rover, SCANIA, and Volvo Trucks. Our telematic control units (TCUs) provide features such as Emergency Call after a crash, remote control and over-the-air vehicle updates

Background:

An important use case for telematics devices is that of collecting data from vehicles/machines and reporting it to a server. This involves several challenges.

• A large amount of data is available in vehicles/machines, much more than what is feasible to report to a server, both for performance reason, but also for cost reasons as a significant cost is associated with uploading data over the cellular network. For these reasons the telematics device must aggregate data in meaningful ways, this to minimize the amount of data that needs to be uploaded via the cellular network. Machine learning algorithms will in some cases be required.
• It’s common to have a wide range of vehicles/machines in a fleet, the available data and data of interest may vary between vehicles/machines. For this reason, the data collection and aggregation must be both flexible and easy to configure (over the air) for different vehicles/machines.
• Data of interest may be available over different types of communication interfaces, and some data collection requires active communication with other units. Thus, a modular architecture and dynamically scriptable behavior is needed.

Challenge:

Invent a “generic” software feature for collecting data via ACTIA’s TCU and back-end. The feature must handle various (and currently unknown) vehicle/machine configurations, be highly remotely configurable and employ smart filtering and compression technique.

Implementation:

The latest telematics platform developed at ACTIA is ACU6 which is a cross segment platform targeting both automotive and off-highway applications. The ACU6 consists of two hardware platforms, a high-end variant called ACU6-Pro which is based on a high-end SoC (Linux), and a low-end variant called ACU6-Lite which is based on an MCU (RTOS). The thesis is targeted at the ACU6-Pro hardware platform, but it’s desirable that the results can be transferred to ACU6-Lite in the future.

A thesis project could comprise the following parts, depending on the interest and number of persons participating:

• Investigate and define aggregation strategies
• Implement the aggregation strategies in the ACU6-Pro device
• Evaluate the effectiveness/usefulness of the aggregation strategies
• Design the principles and SW architecture of the collector
• Implement the collector function as a proof-of-concept
• Work on cloud side functionality needed for configuration of the component

Time period: Spring 2022

Contact: [email protected]; 0708309687

Location: ACTIA Tech-center in Mjärdevi, Linköping.

Tutor at ACTIA: TBA