Abstract

After an era of huge propagation within the field of mobile communications, digitalization has been spreading during the latest years at an accelerating speed to automotive technology and business. Following the developments experienced earlier in the mobile communications branch, open solutions and platforms are emerging in the automotive industries, challenging the traditional proprietary systems. Like in mobile communications, open platforms enable development of a wide variety of novel applications and systems that speed up the digitalization of the automotive and traffic ecosystems and offer the developers new attractive business opportunities. One of such open approaches is the Eclipse Kuksa framework developed in a consortium of European research institutions and automotive industries.

In this study, we explored how the Kuksa framework could be used as a technology basis for an automotive data system combining in-vehicle functionality to cloud-based services. The study was carried out as a part of the SMAD research project of the University of Oulu aiming at an intelligent moving test platform for research of autonomous vehicles built on top of a Toyota Rav4 hybrid car. Our study covered subsystems of the Kuksa framework, the in-vehicle subsystem, cloud subsystems and the data communications between them.

Our results indicate that the Kuksa framework is a feasible basis for the development of open, intelligent automotive data systems, though with a considerable learning needs. The results and experiences of our study provide besides additional knowledge for our continuing research on automotive software, also new, valuable contribution to the Eclipse Kuksa community and the practitioners planning to deploy open approaches in their automotive software development.