Sensor data computation in a heavy vehicle environment : An Edge computation approach

Abstract: In a heavy vehicle, internet connection is not reliable, primarily because the truck often travels to a remote location where network might not be available. The data generated from the sensors in a vehicle might not be sent to the internet when the connection is poor and hence it would be appropriate to store and do some basic computation on those data in the heavy vehicle itself and send it to the cloud when there is a good network connection. The process of doing computation near the place where data is generated is called Edge computing. Scania has its own Edge computation solution, which it uses for doing computations like preprocessing of sensor data, storing data etc. Scania’s solution is compared with a commercial edge computing platform called as AWS (Amazon Web Service’s) Greengrass. The comparison was in terms of Data efficiency, CPU load, and memory footprint. In the conclusion it is shown that Greengrass solution works better than the current Scania solution in terms of CPU load and memory footprint, while in data efficiency even though Scania solution is more efficient compared to Greengrass solution, it was shown that as the truck advances in terms of increasing data size the Greengrass solution might prove competitive to the Scania solution.One more topic that is explored in this thesis is Digital twin. Digital twin is the virtual form of any physical entity, it can be formed by obtaining real-time sensor values that are attached to the physical device. With the help of sensor values, a system with an approximate state of the device can be framed and which can then act as the digital twin. Digital twin can be considered as an important use case of edge computing. The digital twin is realized with the help of AWS Device shadow.