Open standards and interoperability within the automotive domain and smart cities

Abstract: Vehicle signals are today in highly heterogeneous formats which leads to difficulties for third-party developers to access, understand and integrate with these signals. Thus, the automotive domain needs to find a way to describe its vehicle signals to the outside world. At the same time, smart city initiatives are started all over the world to be able to govern digital sources. Through a case study, this thesis aims to find a way to interconnect and achieve interoperability between the automotive- and urban IoT domains by applying open standards. The study was conducted using a Proof of Concept and the use case was based on finding connections between electric vehicles and charging stations. Furthermore, a knowledge graph was used to visualize the interconnectivity between the two domains. To evaluate the knowledge graph and the Proof of Concept criteria unstructured interviews were used. The result of the study showed that open standards can be applied to improve interoperability in this use case. Lastly, three building blocks for interoperability were identified and discussed.