In a major move for the automotive industry, Harman is to make its full connected services platform open source for scalable software defined vehicle (SDV) designs. The open source services are detailed below.
The company, a subsidiary of Samsung since 2017, is making its platform available as the Eclipse Connected Services Platform (ECSP) project. This is already being used in large scale production by car makers for software defined vehicles (SDV) and large fleet operators and will be part of the Eclipse SDV Working Group.
The platform is designed to support connected car deployments of up to 100,000 vehicles by enabling a variety of critical functions, including reliable and secure vehicle-to-cloud connectivity, high-volume vehicle data ingestion and routing, vehicle and device management, user and identity management, streaming application enablement, vehicle telemetry and many more.
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ECSP starts with an offboard platform layer for data collection and processing for vehicle data. Vehicles transmit data using a lightweight MQTT protocol, minimizing data overhead and optimizing bandwidth usage. The Apache Kafka open source streaming platform is used to handle data processing, guaranteeing high throughput, reliable connectivity, and exchanges between vehicles and platform.
There is a remote operations application for vehicles to control door, window, lights, horn, alarm, boot/trunk that demonstrates how new services can be written using the code platform layer as well as Vehicle Profile and Device Management and Configuration Management.
The onboard client is written in C++ and is ready to be deployed on ECUs.
Harman has also developed a Linux-based vehicle simulator to simulate vehicle messages or receiving and responding to messages from a Cloud application. This is provided for testing and development purposes, and the software is integrated with observability tools like Graylog and Prometheus for debug.
A reference iOS/Android application enables vehicle users to visualize platform capabilities.
All of this is available as a one-click framework based on Kubernetes containers and ArgoCD for automated and scalable deployment of applications/services on Amazon Web Services.
This open-source platform is designed to support connected car deployments of up to 100,000 vehicles, while the opensource offering utilizes a community version of open-source software currently like HiveMQ, Zookeeper Kafka, PostgreSQL and MongoDB, the system is inherently scalable for millions of devices in enterprise deployments.
“By open-sourcing our connected services platform, we’re giving others across the industry the ability to build upon that foundation, speed up their development cycles, ensure greater interoperability, and contribute to a more robust, open ecosystem,” said Heiko Huettel, VP of Software Products at Harman
Last year, Harman became a strategic member of the Eclipse SDV Working Group at The Eclipse Foundation.
“Harman is demonstrating industry leadership in contributing the ECSP to the Eclipse SDV Working Group. ECSP brings important new capabilities that accelerate the development of flexible cloud-native vehicle architectures in open source,” said Mike Milinkovich, Executive Director of the Eclipse Foundation. “With advanced support for connectivity, remote management, fleet operations and data monitoring, ECSP gives automotive OEMs a powerful open-source foundation for delivering differentiated in-vehicle experiences.”
projects.eclipse.org/projects/automotive.ecsp; www.harman.com
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