TruckSTM

Embedded computing devices play an integral role in the mechanical operations of modern-day vehicles. These devices exchange information containing critical vehicle parameters that reflect the current state of operations. Such information can be captured for various purposes, such as diagnostics, fleet management, and analytics. Although monitoring individual parameters can be useful for some applications, monitoring distinct combinations of parameters can reveal more complex and higher-level states that may give useful information. Existing monitoring systems either lack user configurability and control or present simple user interfaces that make it difficult to monitor and collate different parameters to observe high-level vehicle states. In this work, we present TruckSTM, a novel application that realizes user-defined states from messages seen in the embedded networks of medium and heavy duty vehicles and displays state transitions on an interactive user interface. We begin by symbolically formulating some of the in-vehicle networking concepts and formally defining the concept of operational states and state transitions. We then elaborate on the operations performed by TruckSTM in mapping network-obtained vehicle parameters to states that can be defined in standard JSON format. Finally, we evaluate TruckSTM’s asymptotic performance and present the results for the worst-case scenario and demonstrate that in a real world scenario such high level state visualization constraints of an operational truck.