Fleet Management

Today’s combustion vehicles include an average of 40 to 70 electronic control units of varying complexity that interconnected via various system buses (CAN, LIN, MOST, FlexRay, Ethernet). Even though the trend is clearly towards automotive Ethernet, traditional systems such as CAN are still holding their own. Hybrid drives and electrification further increase complexity.

Our routers’ core competence is to converge these different data streams and forward them via mobile networks and other interfaces.

The routers are certified for use in vehicles (UN ECE R10, EN 50155) and can communicate with multiple mobile network modules (4G/3G) and several SIM cards. And if the signal is too weak or if one network fails, it is possible to switch to a different provider immediately, for maximum availability and redundancy.

The vehicle position is a central aspect of fleet management. It is reliably provided by the GNSS module integrated in our routers. If a navigation device is used, the route and destination are also known. Particularly when payloads are being transported, the efficient utilization of the vehicle and an optimized route is of great economic interest. As a by-product, fleet management can also contribute to driver education.

The collected data can also be stored locally on a built-in SSD and pre-processed directly by the router using the LXC (Linux container) technology. And even before the data leave the on-board network, they can be prioritized according to importance using Quality of Service (QoS) routing. This ensures that the operating data of greatest relevance to the system always get top priority. State-of-the-art VPN technologies such as OpenVPN allow operating data to be transferred to the central office securely.

The monitoring and maintenance of the NetModule “router fleet” can be centrally controlled by the NetModule Connectivity Suite.

For more information: Connectivity Suite