Today’s society recognizes the need for economic use of energy, and saving energy where possible. There’s a lot of potential for this in the automotive sector. In the course of this case study, the challenge was to develop a car computer, that facilitates energy saving, and itself works in a power-efficient way. A framework to link vehicle and external agents, like smartphones, was developed. This framework is based upon various embedded hardware platforms that are attached to the onboard control units of the car, and it provides services to external and internal agents, such as the on-board computer Interfaces are provided to allow application developers to provide custom, helpful applications. A smartphone can use the framework to query vehicle-specific and general information.

Solution

Architecture

Because the evaluation showed that there is no technology existent to fulfill our needs, a new middleware solution was built completely from scratch using only the Android 4.0.3 SDK, an embedded server solution called RESTlet, the JAX-RS API for RESTful webservices and the Apache Commons Lang package for several String processing operations. The Figure shows the main architecture of the middleware.

Smartphone App

The main activity (see figure) is the first view you’ll see after starting the application. It has the following elements: