Mike Milinkovich, Executive Director of the Eclipse Foundation, met today with representatives of the German Aerospace Center, Bosch, Vector Informatik and Fraunhofer FOKUS to initiate the working group openMobility under the umbrella of the Eclipse Foundation. The partners want to create a common simulation platform for urban areas in a shared collaboration, open source environment. It provides tools for a detailed simulation of the movement of vehicles and people as well as their communication systems. It will be critical in testing driver assistance systems as well as for predicting and optimizing all traffic. In addition, it supports the evaluation of new business concepts such as Mobility-as-a-Service.

The partners contribute different simulators to the openMobility platform – Fraunhofer FOKUS with its simulations framework VSimRTI (V2X Simulation Runtime Infrastructure). It already comprises some simulators, e.g. for traffic, communication and the individual car. VSimRTI can also integrate other simulators with different levels of detail and focus, e.g. for the vehicle battery. In this manner, various interactions can be examined in detail. The app and system developments can thus be programmed more purposefully and hence also faster before they are finally tested on the actual road.

Dr. Ilja Radusch, Director of the Smart Mobility business unit at Fraunhofer FOKUS, sums up his reasons for joining the working group as follows: "In the last six years, we have distributed around 600 licenses for VSimRTI. In the working group, we will discuss how parts of it can be offered as Open Source. I am sure that together with the partners we will be able to establish the open platform as the standard tool for mobility simulations for the industry.”

The working group looks forward to further members.