XFCD Mobile Data Collection, Analysis, and Management
Collecting, analyzing, managing and sharing vehicle sensor data
The enviroCar suite provides a platform to collect, manage, analyze and share Extended Floating Car Data (XFCD). It comprises several individual software packages.
enviroCar App: enviroCar Mobile is an Android application for smartphones that can be used to collect Extended Floating Car Data (XFCD). The app communicates with an OBD2 Bluetooth adapter while the user drives, which enables read access to data from the vehicle’s engine control. The app records this data and the smartphone’s GPS position. The driver can view statistics about his drives and publish his data as open data by uploading tracks to the enviroCar server. It is then available under the ODbL license for further analysis and use. Users can also view and analyze the data via the enviroCar website. enviroCar Mobile is one of the enviroCarCitizen Science platform’s components. It is continuously being developed as part of our Google Summer of Code projects.
enviroCar Server: The enviroCar server’s central tasks are the enviroCar platform user management and the management of the XFCD data provided as Open Data by the enviroCar drivers. To ensure data privacy, the server anonymizes the recorded tracks external access. The enviroCar server’s RESTful API offers the possibility to access statistics as well as space and time related subsets of the data in different formats.
enviroCarPy: The enviroCarPy Python package is a lean extension that wraps the enviroCar REST API to ease access to the data. It allows users to query and download XFCD data via the enviroCar Rest-API.
During 2023, we concluded the integration of interesting new features and updated a majority of the software libraries for the enviroCar app. This contributed significantly to the application software’s stability on various devices, using different Android versions, OBD adapters and vehicles. In the context of the DVDO LHS project we established a set of new features such as campaign measurements profiles, additional parameters such as acceleration as well as a real-time upload of measurements during a drive.
Benefits
- Easy collection of Extended Floating Car Data
- Optional automation of data collection and upload
- Estimation of fuel consumption and CO2 emissions
- Publishing anonymized track data as Open Data
- Map-based visualization of track data and track statistics
- User management support
- XFCD data management
- Open API for data export:JSON, CSV, SHP
- Linked Data/RDF API
- Publishing anonymized tracks via Apache Kafka
- GDPR compliance
- Easier access to enviroCar data for an analysis in Python
- Several Jupyter notebooks with examples of use-cases
Fields of Application
The enviroCar suite supports the collection, analysis, sharing and management of XFCD data in an open Citizen Science community. This community of scientists, traffic engineers, public administration staff and citizens work together to gain better road traffic information to reduce the environmental impact of motorized traffic and to improve road safety. The enviroCar app can be used free of charge. The data is also available free of charge, as open data to the general public.