Wireless Information Collection Environment
The WICE system is a powerful and flexible Automotive Telematics system developed by Alkit Communications AB providing access to measurement data from connected vehicles, enabling Fleet Management and State-of-Health services, supporting Rapid Prototyping of new ECU functions, and remote ECU software download.
The WICE platform and services
The WICE system consists of two main parts (see Figure 1):
- An in-vehicle data logging and measurement system (also known as Wireless Communication Unit, WCU), including connectivity and telematics services. A number of different hardware platforms are available for in-vehicle installation, including the MX-4 platform from Host Mobility. The in-vehicle hardware unit supports communication interfaces for measuring and logging vehicular data (including CAN, LIN and FlexRay buses, analog inputs, digital inputs, USB and Ethernet).
- A back-end server infrastructure including a data lake storage, database with meta-information, a web-based front-end user interface (known as the “WICE Portal”), and a REST-based programming API.
Figure 1: Overview of the WICE system
The following application services are supported by the WICE system:
- A Data Capture service, enabling engineers (or other users) to collect measurement data of different kinds from connected vehicles. This includes CAN/FlexRay/LIN/Ethernet frames and signals, audio, video, UDS diagnostics, internal ECU signals accessed through CCP or XCP, and more. Measurement assignments can be sent to connected vehicles through the WICE Portal interface, and measurement data can be accessed and downloaded for analysis.
- A Fleet Management service, keeping track of the status of fleets of test vehicles, including map-based positioning, mileage, uptime, Diagnostic Trouble Codes, ECU software version numbers, etc.
- A Rapid Prototyping platform, enabling emulated execution of ECU services in the in-vehicle WICE unit, for proof-of-concept testing of new automotive functions and services.
- A Remote Software Download (SWDL) service, making it possible to remotely re-program in-vehicle ECUs, enabling continuous deployment of ECU software in test vehicle fleets.
A whitepaper is available here.