I-Corps: Translation Potential of Smart Software-Defined Vehicle Management Technology

The broader impact of this I-Corps project is the development of a software container management technology for vehicles. Currently, software containers are emerging technologies that enable easy deployment of the software as services, independent from the hardware devices hosting them in such devices as smart and connected vehicles. The execution of software containers can become computationally expensive in constrained environments with limited central processing unit (CPU) memory and energy resources.

This technology is designed to provide efficient management of these containers, which is key to enabling the on-demand usage of vehicle software applications while considering several constraints and priorities including security.

This I-Corps project utilizes experiential learning coupled with a first-hand investigation of the industry ecosystem to assess the translation potential of the technology. This technology is based on the prior development of software container management technology for constrained environments such as embedded devices/electronic control units (ECUs) in smart cars.

The technology is an orchestration solution to manage the performance of software running both on the edge and in the cloud. The technology balances the load between ECUs in the car, minimizing the CPU memory and power consumption when in power saving mode, while also handling the constraints in the car and in other devices such as phones. The technology is designed to allocate or move or suspend containers between the clusters/ECUs.

The solution was evaluated using different real-world scenarios (e.g., bugs isolation and low energy mode), using heterogeneous clusters of ECU devices in the vehicle. The technology represents one of the first container management tools for software running in constrained devices.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.