IoT4Emissions is a scalable cloud service platform enabling the collection and management of metering data originating from millions of IoT devices.
We developed the system to demonstrate the way in which on-board fuel and energy consumption metering (OBFCM) data can be collected, Over-the-Air (OTA), from hundreds of millions of vehicles. The solution addresses the need of the European Environment Agency to anonymously collect OBFCM data directly from the majority of passenger vehicles registered in the European Union. The need surfaced following the entry into force of a new EU regulation on Real-World Emissions (RWE) monitoring which will soon be followed by further legislative proposals by the Commission’s Directorate-General for Climate Action (DG CLIMA).
From January 2021 onwards, every new passenger vehicle sold in an EU member state is equipped with an OBFCM device which keeps a permanent record of the vehicle’s lifetime mileage, fuel consumption and electric energy consumption. The OBFCM data is stored onboard each vehicle such that it can later be collected and processed by the European Commission to evaluate the Real World Emissions (RWE) generated by road transport in Europe.
Since 2019 Ideas Forward has been working with the Sustainable Transport Unit of the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre on a technical study of Over-the-Air data transfer methods that would allow collecting OBFCM data from vehicles at very large scale. In parallel we have been working as a subcontractor of the CLOVE consortium to develop the technical requirements for the upcoming regulation of OTA data transfer of OBFCM data.
In the context of this work we developed the functional and non-functional requirements for the OTA mechanism and designed a protocol for vehicle-to-cloud communication building on the MQTT standard. Feedback on the OTA mechanism was provided by vehicle manufacturers and automotive component suppliers through the European Commission’s Onboard Monitoring Task Force. A technical solution framework was developed which conceptualizes an OTA data transfer approach that is secure, privacy-preserving, tamper-resistant, scalable and future-proof.
As an extension to this work we designed a cloud service platform capable of large-scale workloads from millions of communication events, built the system on top of AWS services (AWS IoT Core, AWS SQS, AWS Lambda, AWS Timestream, MongoDB, with Dockerized Node.js applications running on AWS Beanstalk). To test and demonstrate the operation of the platform we developed a vehicle fleet simulator and a web demonstrator.
Read more in the published: JRC Science for Policy Report “Collection of fleet-wide fuel and energy consumption data from road vehicles”
