Demand-driven data acquisition for large scale fleets

Abstract

Automakers manage vast fleets of connected vehicles and face an ever-increasing demand for their sensor readings. This demand originates from many stakeholders, each potentially requiring different sensors from different vehicles. Currently, this demand remains largely unfulfilled due to a lack of systems that can handle such diverse demands efficiently. Vehicles are usually passive participants in data acquisition, each continuously reading and transmitting the same static set of sensors. However, in a multi-tenant setup with diverse data demands, each vehicle potentially needs to provide different data instead. We present a system that performs such vehicle-specific minimization of data acquisition by mapping individual data demands to individual vehicles. We collect personal data only after prior consent and fulfill the requirements of the GDPR. Non-personal data can be collected by directly addressing individual vehicles. The system consists of a software component natively integrated with a major automaker’s vehicle platform and a cloud platform brokering access to acquired data. Sensor readings are either provided via near real-time streaming or as recorded trip files that provide specific consistency guarantees. A performance evaluation with over 200,000 simulated vehicles has shown that our system can increase server capacity on-demand and process streaming data within 269 ms on average during peak load. The resulting architecture can be used by other automakers or operators of large sensor networks. Native vehicle integration is not mandatory; the architecture can also be used with retrofitted hardware such as OBD readers. © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.