EMMA Project Summary

The EMMA project has an overarching goal of utilising new embedded middleware to support the underlying logic and communications required for future cooperating wireless objects and the applications they may support in the automotive and road transport domains.

This trend in the deployment of digital processing widely into the environment – what is variously called ambient intelligence, ubiquitous computing, the internet of things, or just ‘smart’ technology, goes well beyond transport and will impact on almost every aspect of our lives. Just as the World Wide Web was a one-time transition in the technology landscape, bringing information into a globally integrated system, so we are just at the start of another one-time transition, linking up things through embedded intelligence and communications.

In the case of EMMA, the things being automobiles and their constituent parts, and the infrastructure they utilise (both physical in the sense of roads and the ICT embedded in them for monitoring and control purposes). If we think more widely at present, most of the world’s computing power is already embedded invisibly into the things around us. The personal computers, music players and other gadgets are just the tip of the iceberg. They probably represent no more than 1% of the computing power we have deployed around us. A typical car today will have at least 20 microprocessors and a host of other electronics contributing to the general functionality required by a modern car as well as the ‘value added services’ which may be the USP (Unique Selling Point) of a particular vehicle – whether the application, be: better information on how the vehicle is running; safety applications; or infotainment in the vehicle to name but three.

The EMMA project is committed to deliver a middleware platform and a development environment which facilitates the design and implementation of embedded software for cooperative sensing objects. The ultimate aim that the project will focus on delivering, is to hide the complexity of the underlying infrastructure whilst providing open interfaces to 3rd parties enabling the faster, cost-efficient development of new cooperative sensing applications. This end-product will be accompanied by a publicly available specification (PAS) that will help to facilitate its wider adoption.

In order to validate the EMMA middleware a set of lab tests on a number of wireless cooperative objects (wicos) will be performed. Furthermore the results will also be validated, in a second step, in the context of a number of applications: within an automotive subsystem, a car level and at a supra-car level (intelligent infrastructure).

To rationalise this ambitious goal, it is worth stating that in the consortiums expert opinion, over the coming decade, this embedded processing will allow any and all of the objects around us to connect to the power of the global Web and localised intelligent networks. On the one hand, the embedded power puts huge amounts of processing power just where it’s needed, in sensors and actuators that help to prevent collisions, for example, or to collect vast amounts of real-time information on how the vehicles engine is performing, in a way not considered feasible even a few years ago by the automotive industry. On the other hand, the link to the Web allows any object, however humble, to be visible over the Web to any applications, and to link into the power of the Web as an information utility to call up any resources needed. By providing a publicly available specification, the project will enable researchers and developers to rapidly implement wireless cooperative objects and move towards the future goal of delivering more intelligence into the infrastructure and into the vehicle. This new level of cooperation and communication between the infrastructure and vehicle will open a new range of services and application to support safety, information gathering and dissemination and traffic management functions. To summarise, EMMA will play a significant role in developing the embedded software environment to connect the new generations of wireless cooperative objectives, which are emerging as a significant new technology in the automotive and road transport domain, through the development of an open specification and development platform and the validation of the results through a range of prototype applications at the sub-system, vehicle and vehicle to infrastructure level.