A Mobile and Web Platform for Crowdsourcing OBD-II Vehicle Data

On-Board Diagnostics 2 (OBD-II) protocol allows monitoring vehicle status parameters. Analyzing them is highly useful for Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) research, applications and services. Unfortunately, large-scale OBD datasets are not publicly available due to the effort of producing them as well as due to competitiveness in the automotive sector. This paper proposes a framework to enable a worldwide crowdsourcing approach to the generation of OBD-II data, similarly to OpenStreetMap (OSM) for cartography. The proposal comprises: (i) an extension of the GPX data format for route logging, augmented with OBD-II parameters; (ii) a fork of an open source Android OBD-II data logger to store and upload route traces, and (iii) a Web platform extending the OSM codebase to support storage, search and editing of traces with embedded OBD data. A full platform prototype has been developed and early scalability tests have been carried out in various workloads to assess the sustainability of the proposal.