Vehicle-oriented services and networks are already becoming a reality, driven by safety requirements and by the investments of both car manufacturers and Public Transport Authorities. Nowadays, much research effort is being put into defining or adapting radio technologies and networks (e.g., extension of WiFi for vehicles, or the CALM architecture), advanced services (e.g., eCall or dynamic navigation) and human-machine interaction specific to the vehicle environment, among others.

In this new scenario in which vehicles will communicate among them, with the road infrastructure and with the Internet, the need for an open but yet standardized platform to build services arises as a key element. And, almost naturally, OSGi arises as an excellent base to build such a platform, i.e., to pave the way towards building advanced services for drivers and passengers. The OSGi technology provides a very mature component system that works in a large number of environments and is used to build highly complex applications like IDEs (Eclipse), application servers (GlassFish, IBM Websphere, Oracle/BEA Weblogic, Jonas, JBoss), application frameworks (Spring, Guice), industrial automation, residential gateways, phones… and tomorrow also vehicles. For this reason, the Vehicle Expert Group (VEG) of the OSGi Alliance, of which Telefónica R&D is a full member, has already started tailoring and extending the OSGi specification to meet vehicle-specific requirements.

Besides promoting the use of OSGi in vehicular environments, and encouraging new stakeholders to partake in the activities of the OSGi Alliance VEG, the workshop “Challenges and opportunities for OSGi in the vehicular environment” will bring together R&D experiences and proposals around this topic with the aim to chart out the current state-of-the-art of OSGi in vehicles; to identify the challenges and opportunities of this technology for future services that will help make road trips safer, more comfortable and more efficient; and to serve as an open forum for presenting and discussing ideas, and also for establishing collaborations to foster the use of OSGi in vehicles.