The Ford Research Center Aachen is the corporate European research facility of Ford Motor Company. The Telematics research section within the Ford Research Center Aachen is an acknowledged partner in a range of Ford Motor Company internal as well as publicly funded telematics research projects both in Germany as well as in Europe. The ITS world congress in Chicago is an appropriate forum to present the development of innovative communication and system architectures to provide Ford customers stable and secure telematics services within the stadtinfokln context. stadtinfokln (City Information Cologne) is a telematics research project supported by 15 industrial and academic partners. The aim of stadtinfokln is to develop a range of innovative telematics services in order to ease mobility in conurbations. The purpose of this paper is to discuss a state-of-the-art communication and systems architecture for centralized service provision that was developed and evaluated within the stadtinfokln framework. With the introduction of new advanced telematics services, it is essential to transmit information from the Service Provider (SP) to in-car terminals over the air (both, via broadcast as well as point-to-point communication). Besides broadcast communication, it is necessary to also implement a robust and highly bi-directional efficient communication to allow processing individualized information. Intelligent algorithms and communication protocols that also survive in the automotive environment support these requirements. Only information that is required to support the car driver in a certain driving situation is transferred. The algorithm handles all of the decision-making processes. The communication protocol provides compression and validation of the transmitted data. New complex service architectures are required to process data out of different information sources and in order to adapt these services for their use within the vehicle. Authentication, billing, logging and personalization mechanism enable to adapt telematics services available to special costumer needs. The telematics research group of the Ford Research Center Aachen has developed the software for also providing stadtinfokln services to Car-PC-based in-car devices. The team has also suitable communication protocols for a robust communication over the air developed and implemented.
Abstract