VEWE: A Vehicle ECU wireless emulation tool supporting OBD-II communication and geopositioning

Abstract

Almost all the vehicles built during the last decade integrate an On Board Diagnostic (OBD-II) interface, through which it is possible to monitor and manage multiple operational parameters. In the past few years, Bluetooth OBD-II devices have been introduced in the market to facilitate connection to mobile devices. With the increased use of these devices, many applications for real-time control and monitoring of different parameters are being developed in the automotive sector. This infrastructure has opened a broad research area related to smart driving. The main problem in the development and testing of these applications is the need to debug and validate them using different vehicles, under different configurations and scenarios. Our proposal to address this problem is VEWE: Vehicle Wireless Emulator offering realistic vehicle dynamics, which allows testing the correctness and the performance of mobile applications using off-the-shelf computers, thereby speeding up the development time and lowering costs. Another useful functionality of VEWE is the emulation of Geo-positions in Android systems through a GPS-Emulator. By combining both functionalities, VEWE provides a complete and flexible development environment for mobile vehicular applications. © 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland.