Developing a Fully Portable Containerized Edge Architecture (for Comm Vehicle Industry Adoption)

Presented at EclipseCon 2023 in Ludwigsburg, Germany by Carlton Bale (Cummins Inc) and Dr. Martin Brown (Cummins Inc.).
By developing a fully portable and hardware-agnostic edge architecture, Cummins reduced Edge IoT software development costs and time-to-market by over 50%. This new architecture is launching on our edge telematics hardware in Q4-2023. We are collaborating with Eclipse SDV and numerous commercial vehicle partners to adapt this archtecture to third-party telematics hardware so that it can be adopted across the commercial vehicle industry. The background portion of this presentation summarizes the journey from initial concept to achieving industry adoption through continued engagement with numerous industry partners.
The technical portion of this topic covers optimizing resource utilization on low-powered edge devices, enabling software orchestration with minimal overhead, and securing communications while meeting strict cybersecurity requirements.
Optimizing Resource Utilization on Low-Power Edge Hardware was achieved by using small base OCI images, and by minimizing and reusing dependencies. The overhead and configuration requirements for Podman and rootless Docker are also covered.
Software Orchestration on Edge Devices, with container monitoring and management, was achieved completely through open-source means, avoiding proprietary solutions. This includes updating mission-critical containers using local OCI-compliant repositories.
Secure Communication and Message Standards is the primary area of contributions to Eclipse SDV, focusing on the Eclipse Kanto and Eclipse Kuksa projects. This includes leveraging an MQTT API and design that is being shared as a reference for secure communication between containers and with the vehicle CAN. This also includes techniques to monitor and confirm the delivery of critical messages, and highlights observed cybersecurity issues.
Finally, the topic summarizes the business outcome achieved, with over 50% reduction in software development time and cost. Because this architecture enables parallel hardware and software development efforts, it enabled Cummins to deliver a digital product on time and within budget for the first time in 10 years working in this space.
Time permitting, the presentation will conclude with a brief demonstration of our full production container-based edge hardware/software and cloud management solution, which is launching in Q4-2023.