The Eclipse Foundation announced the launch of the openMobility Working Group that will focus on open and shared collaboration around one of the major issues in urban planning around autonomous vehicles and future transportation requirements — traffic simulation and modelling.
Based on the Eclipse Simulation of Urban Mobility (SUMO) project that originated at the German Aerospace Center, the openMobility Working Group brings together researchers and industry to create a common simulation platform for urban areas in a shared collaboration, open source environment. This framework will provide the tools for a detailed simulation of the movement of people and vehicles as well as their communication systems. It will be critical in testing driver assistance systems, predicting and optimizing traffic as well as evaluating new business concepts such as Mobility-as-a-Service.
In addition to the openMobility Working Group, the Eclipse Foundation also supports two other automobile and transportation industry Working Groups, Eclipse openPASS (frameworks and modules for simulating advanced driver assistance and automated driving) and Eclipse openMDM (tools and systems for the standardized management of measured data).
These automotive mobility ecosystem initiatives are designed to make transportation safer for everyone and accelerate innovation through collaboration with the aim to:
- Share intellectual property without the threat of antitrust and regulatory challenges;
- Enable the creation of a common open platform for automotive and transportation software quality assurance and testing;
- Share costs and innovation below the value line and focus on investing scarce resources on building differentiated features;
- Accelerate product development and thereby improve time-to-revenue;
- Leverage open collaboration as a force multiplier for members at a time of a huge developer shortage, sharing engineering resources versus redundant hiring of talent to do the same work in vendor silos;
- Enable ecosystem participants alike to safely collaborate across value chains and industries to develop new business models and revenue streams.