A WEB-BASED CENTRAL GATEWAY INFRASTRUCTURE IN THE

AUTOMOTIVE AFTER-SALES MARKET

Business Interoperability through the Web

Geert Houben, Kris Luyten, Karin Coninx

Hasselt University – tUL – Expertise Centre for Digital Media

Wetenschapspark, 2, BE-3590 Diepenbeek, Belgium

Frank Sch

onherr

MUL-Services GmbH

Pontdriesch, 10, D-52062 Aachen, Germany

Keywords:

Automotive aftermarket, technical information, SOA, e-procurement, EAI, service provisioning.

Abstract:

The Block Excemption Regulation of the European Commission was enacted in 2002 with the goal to

strengthen competition between dependent and independent repairers in the automotive after-sales market.

The FP6 MYCAREVENT project embraces these goals while triggering new business opportunities by estab-

lishing a mobile accessible infrastructure as single gateway to different kinds of resources. This information

procurement framework allows customers to ﬁnd speciﬁc vehicle repair and diagnostic data from different car

manufacturers and 3

parties in the same way. In order to provide a higher degree of accessibility, extensibil-

ity and adaptivity, our service-oriented infrastructure presented in this paper is web-based and consists of three

main components: Mobile Clients, Service Portal and Remote Services. New communication and multime-

dia technologies are invoked to improve interoperability, usability and maintenance of the underlying Mobile

Service World. In this paper we focus on the architecture of our highly ﬂexible procurement infrastructure.

Standardized elements and methodologies ensure an integrated solution and enable easy expandability with

new content, services and components.

1 INTRODUCTION

The European automotive market is known as being

very competitive due to the large amount of car man-

ufacturers (OEMs). The after-sales market is just a

branch of this industry but plays a very important

role from a business perspective (¤ 40 billion p.a.

volume), and will become even more important in

the future. In the FP6 MYCAREVENT project, new

services and innovative applications are being devel-

oped to support different types of end-users to cope

with the increasing -electronic- complexity of cars

and their repair procedures. New communication and

multimedia technologies are exploited to improve the

accessibility and usability of the information and ser-

vices, which can be seamlessly and securely accessed

by different types of mobile devices ((Houben et al.,

2005a)). End-users in the sense of MYCAREVENT

are workshop mechanics, roadside technicians, sup-

port call-centre operators and the driver.

Car manufacturers have a comprehensible interest

to protect their IPR and to safeguard market shares.

But internal secrecy of vehicle related repair informa-

tion could cause market restrictions for the after-sales

sector. The Block Exemption Regulation (BER) of

the European Commission ((FIGIEFA, 2002)) targets

this issue to widely open the market to independent

repairers as well as enabling further business oppor-

tunities. By giving all service providers the same right

to access different kinds of repair and diagnosis infor-

mation, training material and tools, the competition

and competitiveness of the after-sales market will be

strengthened. However, there is only limited collab-

oration among the key players in this ﬁeld and the

traditional business models and processes do not fa-

cilitate interaction among market participants. The

project aims to create a win-win-situation for all key

players by establishing a suitable framework to sup-

port this collaboration. We call the collection of ser-

vices, users and content the MYCAREVENT Mobile

Service World, see Figure 1.

Houben G., Luyten K., Coninx K. and Schönherr F. (2007).

A WEB-BASED CENTRAL GATEWAY INFRASTRUCTURE IN THE AUTOMOTIVE AFTER-SALES MARKET - Business Interoperability through the

Web.

In Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - SAIC, pages 45-50

DOI: 10.5220/0002365700450050

 SciTePress

Figure 1: The MYCAREVENT Mobile Service World.

The key innovation in the project is the seamless

integration of novel services and different informa-

tion sources via a Service Portal as single point of

access for end-users. To enable this integration and

to harmonize the access of information from a huge

variety of repositories, we present a uniﬁed deﬁnition

of car-repair service interfaces together with a web-

service oriented middleware. Companies are able to

host their own services and share information regard-

less of the underlying software platforms. Standard-

ized XML messaging, a generic workﬂow and con-

sistent meta-data structures are required for providing

advanced search and diagnosis mechanisms as well as

uniﬁed user interfaces to access this information.

Mobility is an important requirement: the degree

of accessibility of the Internet these days allows the

customer to be connected whenever and wherever.

The MYCAREVENT infrastructure is a network of

several interrelated web entities: web servers that are

connected over the Internet and communicating using

XML web services (Booth et al., 2004). This implies

considerable advantages regarding software updates,

accessibility, modularity and integration of new ser-

vices. Nevertheless such a loosely coupled interor-

ganizational network requires predeﬁned communi-

cation rules and well-deﬁned interfaces.

A detailed project requirement analyzes phase

mainly revealed four important aspects, not only rele-

vant within MYCAREVENT:

• Flexibility in the supported business models to

cover existing market situations and to increase

acceptance on user and on provider side

• Integration of various and inhomogeneous kinds

of information structures and repositories

• Providing a uniﬁed/homogeneous user interface

and search functionality to facilitate easy access

to repair information

• Expandability towards future services and (meta)

data requirements which could arise e.g. from

follow-up regulations of the current BER

In this paper we focus on the architecture of the

information procurement infrastructure and the nec-

essary elements that contribute to the smooth integra-

tion and cooperation of isolated services or informa-

tion repositories. During the last two years of MY-

CAREVENT a prototype with a short time-to-market

is developed and will be reﬁned, amended and ﬁ-

nalised in the upcoming year. Business and operator

models are deﬁned for the exploitation phase of the

product, but are out of the scope of this paper ((Garg

et al., 2004)). In the following section we describe

in more detail the scope, the goal, the challenges, the

beneﬁts and the target user groups our architecture has

to deal with.

2 PROCUREMENT

INFRASTRUCTURE

The Block Exemption Regulation (BER) provides the

legal framework for regulations regarding the dis-

tribution and maintenance of motor vehicles. MY-

CAREVENT offers a uniform and generic solution

which not only covers the BER regulation but also

allows the user to compare information and offers ac-

cess to advanced services (examples are provided fur-

ther in the text). We call this framework the ‘repair in-

formation procurement infrastructure’ as it is directed

form the information supplier to the customer.

When having a closer look on the automotive af-

termarket, a huge collection of technical information

exists within car companies, independent roadside as-

sistance services and driver organisations. Bringing

this content together, linking it with diagnostic infor-

mation and offering uniﬁed access to it via a single

mobile accessible platform will allow manufacturer-

dependent as well as independent mechanics and also

drivers

to speed up information retrieval and con-

sequently repair procedures. Market analysis ((MY-

CAREVENT, 2005)) have shown huge beneﬁts for

the different user groups. This paper will mainly fo-

cus on the architecture and technological challenges.

A major challenge is the remarkable diversity

in the structuring, naming and composition of data

It is not intended by MYCAREVENT to provide the

driver with the same kind of repair information than profes-

sional mechanics

ICEIS 2007 - International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems

within different car companies and other content

providers. This heterogeneity requires a well-deﬁned,

standardized MYCAREVENT data model that is ﬂex-

ible, adaptable and implemented across the differ-

ent content providers. The data model, developed

within the project, is a meta model; it describes the

data and extends it with uniform properties to make

it accessible and analysable by a wide variety of ad-

vanced search mechanisms, like Ontologies ((Bryan

and Wright, 2005)) or Expert systems. This approach

permits leaving the original content provider/OEM

data largely untouched, having in mind that forcing a

change of existing data provider structures easily can

incur unpredictable costs as it targets related author-

ing systems and processes.

The data model concept described in the previ-

ous paragraph forms the basis for the message for-

mat that is deﬁned to enable standardized communi-

cation between the various components and services.

The ﬂow of information and the order of interaction

between the end-user and the system are laid down

by the generic workﬂow steps. Communication links

are established over the standard Internet protocol:

SOAP envelopes are used to circulate generic XML

messages over HTTP. Identical web service interfaces

are implemented on top of every component. Using

the Internet for communicating offers advantages re-

garding mobility, adaptivity, ubiquity and extensibil-

ity. Nevertheless the use of an open media requires

a secure and authenticated communication channel,

e.g. via VPN-routers as a cost-efﬁcient and well-

established industrial standard.

The web service interfaces, the standardized mes-

saging and the generic workﬂow are the three basic

elements for communication between previously iso-

lated entities. Due to these elements, it is clear and

well deﬁned respectively how to communicate, what

to communicate and in which order to communicate.

Three main parts constitute the infrastructure:

Mobile Clients (accessing the information), the Ser-

vice Portal (core of the infrastructure) and the Remote

Services (providing services or information). The Ser-

vice Portal is the core component that channels the

user demand through a single, comprehensive gate-

way. It covers ﬂexible business rules and basic re-

quirements, such as user management, to enable a

wide variety of functionalities such as multi-language

search and diagnosis, information distribution, host-

ing and authoring of repair information. Eventu-

ally it makes centrally accessible the range of MY-

CAREVENT Remote Services.

Examples of services and content in the MY-

CAREVENT Mobile Service World are: Interactive

Circuit Diagrams to repair electronic components in

the car, Technical Tips about generally operated repa-

rations or ﬁxes on speciﬁc car models, Electronic

Driver Manuals with animations and graphical data,

Diagnostic Services to analyse vehicle fault codes, an

Expert System to lead the user through the diagno-

sis of a car breakdown, Value Added Services for the

driver (infotainment, news, trafﬁc information, simple

guided car reparations), an Advanced Query Service

for searching repair information by making use of on-

tologies.

The MYCAREVENT infrastructure offers multi-

ple beneﬁts to the aftermarket. Services and content

from different companies and organisations are inte-

grated into a single service portal that is ‘always, ev-

erywhere and uniformly’ accessible on different mo-

bile devices. By its interoperability between different

providers, services that were previously stand-alone

entities can now be combined and amended with the

further information available in the infrastructure. It

brings vehicle information handling, gathering, main-

tenance and repair to a higher level of use; for exam-

ple, in the case of a breakdown, linking the fault code

of the car with simple self-repair instructions (movie,

pictures, etc.) ((Houben et al., 2005b)); or answer-

ing iterative hierarchical questions to an Expert Sys-

tem which eventually provides the most probable er-

ror and an advice whether it is safe to continuing driv-

ing or not.

On the repair level, independent workshops or

roadside assistance companies are able to easily ac-

cess OEM information, which allows them to per-

form even complex repairs. Repair and diagnosis pro-

cedures are speeded up, success rates are enhanced

while sharing infrastructure costs, resulting eventu-

ally in higher customer satisfaction. On the level of

information provision via the infrastructure; by pro-

viding different information from different resources,

it can be easily compared, in content and price.

3 SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE

In this section the architecture of the repair informa-

tion procurement framework is described. The basic

ﬂow of information between mobile clients, the por-

tal and the remote services is deﬁned as follows: the

client requests information from the portal, the portal

routes this request to the appropriate service(s), these

service(s) respond to the portal, which forwards the

response to the client. These workﬂow steps are elab-

orated in Section 3.2. The communication between

the components is supported by XML-based mes-

sages and corresponding web services. Web services

allow us to use the standard HTTP protocol without

A WEB-BASED CENTRAL GATEWAY INFRASTRUCTURE IN THE AUTOMOTIVE AFTER-SALES MARKET -

Business Interoperability through the Web

Figure 2: Architectural overview of the procurement frame-

work.

incurring ﬁrewall restrictions or interoperability prob-

lems.

The clients of the Service Portal are the mobile ap-

plication providers offering the user interface for uti-

lizing and querying the portal. In Section 3.1 we will

focus on such a client that has been implemented as

part of the presented infrastructure: the Presentation

Server. The Presentation Server translates the portal

messages into human readable web pages and serves

as the interaction layer between the end-user and the

MYCAREVENT infrastructure.

3.1 System Components

Figure 2 shows the architectural overview of the in-

frastructure. This architecture enables the develop-

ment of different presentation engines (user inter-

faces) or end-user applications, related to the business

model of the respective provider. These applications

can depend on the envisaged target user group, the en-

visaged information provisioning, the envisaged tar-

get device etc. In the prototype we have created, cur-

rently there is one direct consumer of the portal web

service interface: the Presentation Server (PS).

The PS is a web server that consists of two main

parts: a message engine to communicate with the Ser-

vice Portal and a visualization engine that provides

the user interface. The visualization engine trans-

forms the portal messages into user readable and in-

teractive web pages accessible with a standard web

browser. This web-based approach has several bene-

ﬁts: a standard web browser can be used and is avail-

able on nearly all platforms; updates are done on the

server instead of updating all the clients; processing

the data at runtime is done server-side and does not

rely on the client. This last advantage ensures the re-

quired capabilities for client devices to interact with

the PS are limited and a wide range of devices can

be used. There are also some disadvantages or re-

strictions using the web-based approach, e.g. limited

graphical support, browser plug-ins needed for ded-

icated or advanced functionality, but after all it ﬁts

very well the requirements and idea of ‘ubiquity’ of

MYCAREVENT. The client terminals in ﬁgure 2 are

connected to the Service Portal/Presentation Server

by using a Intelligent Connection (INCO) which pro-

vides seamless connectivity regardless of the used ra-

dio access system (GSM, UMTS, WLAN, ...), see e.g.

(Gehlen et al., 2006) for more details.

The Service Portal answers the incoming PS re-

quests with downloaded data to the client devices –

like repair/diagnosis information – or with routing the

request to the appropriate services. Multiple Remote

Services can be simultaneously queried within the

same user inquiry to provide the customer supplemen-

tary and diversiﬁed results. The direct querying and

comparison of different providers enables transpar-

ent user decisions. When e.g. an independent road-

side assistance organisation provides technical tips on

reparations for a speciﬁc car type, in similar cases

these tips could be more useful than buying the of-

ﬁcial OEM repair manual for twice the price. But

price comparison is not the most important beneﬁt;

the customer gets a better and more speciﬁc offer due

to the extensive range of content and information that

is available on the one hand and because of the deliv-

ered data is tailored to the user situation on the other

hand.

In Section 2 we already gave some examples for

Remote Services. The next example shows the use

of it. Think of the following scenario: your car has

broken down and the roadside technician accesses the

MYCAREVENT system with a dedicated application

on his PDA. The PDA connects with the car diag-

nosis plug (OBD) over Bluetooth, reads out the fault

code and sends it to the portal over GPRS. The por-

tal forwards the code to the diagnosis services, which

translates it and returns a description of this fault in

MYCAREVENT terms (according to the information

ICEIS 2007 - International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems

Figure 3: The main steps of the information procurement

generic workﬂow.

model). The portal forwards this fault description

to the Advanced Query Service, which answers with

document search results related to that fault, even if

the fault or document itself is not expressed in MY-

CAREVENT terminology (see the meta model con-

cept above). The list of solutions is sent to the techni-

cian who downloads the document(s) that are required

to ﬁx the problem.

3.2 Generic Workﬂow

Information procurement with the MYCAREVENT

infrastructure is a stepwise and well-deﬁned process,

divided into six successive steps (Figure 3). This

workﬂow deﬁnes the ﬂow of information and the im-

plicit and explicit user interactions with the system.

The ﬁrst step in the workﬂow is the user authen-

tication. Secondly the user has to choose a mis-

sion from the mission menu. Examples of missions

that are included in the implemented prototype are:

searching for repair information, training on using the

infrastructure, vehicle diagnosis, driver self-help etc.

The third step is vehicle identiﬁcation. Accessing re-

pair or diagnostic information makes in most cases

only sense when the particular vehicle is identiﬁed or

at least the make and model are known. Based on

further car properties like sales model, year of manu-

facturing or fuel type, services can decide if they are

able to provide useful information or request via mes-

saging more details. Selecting or deselecting (ﬁlter-

ing) particular services for being multi-queried is step

four.

In the ﬁfth step the queried services have the op-

portunity to request further information from the user

in order to provide more appropriate solutions. E.g. in

the ’Repair information’ mission the services can ask

the user via the PS for the car component and subcom-

ponent (e.g. ‘Washer system’, ‘Headlight washer’) or

a symptom description (e.g. ‘Headlight washer does

not function anymore’). The sixth and last step is the

solution retrieval. As the infrastructure is web-based,

the solution is downloaded from the portal or from a

content provider.

Figure 4: Flow of information in the MYCAREVENT in-

frastructure.

Figure 4 illustrates the situation in the current pro-

totype, comparable to the geographical ‘widespread’

of MYCAREVENT users, service and data providers.

For example, a client in Spain uses a laptop to ac-

cess the MYCAREVENT framework over the Inter-

net. The user communicates with the Presentation

Server that translates the HTTP requests into mes-

sages conform with the standardized message struc-

ture. These messages are sent to the portal, which

forwards them to the appropriate services. The portal

bundles the responses from the services and sent the

result to the Presentation Server that generates HTML

pages which can be accessed by the client that initi-

ated the request. This process is repeated for each step

in the workﬂow.

3.3 Message Deﬁnition

The web service communication between the compo-

nents is not method-based, but uses XML-based mes-

sages to interact with the web services. Only a sin-

gle method is therefore required in the web service

layers that takes care of the messages: MCEMessage

SendMessage(MCEMessage).

In the introduction of this paper we described

the uniﬁed access to different sources of informa-

tion from different companies/information providers.

As these sources have no uniform data structures, a

standardized meta-model has to be created to embed

the original information in or to ‘describe’ the infor-

mation. This allows search engines to ﬁnd the rel-

evant information. The data model, deﬁned in the

project to deal with these issues, is called GIIRM

A WEB-BASED CENTRAL GATEWAY INFRASTRUCTURE IN THE AUTOMOTIVE AFTER-SALES MARKET -

Business Interoperability through the Web

(Generic Integrated Information Reference Model,

(MYCAREVENT, 2006)). It reﬂects and recognizes

relationships between faults, vehicle systems, symp-

toms, repair information etc. which enables ‘intelli-

gent’ searching.

The MYCAREVENT message structure is an ag-

gregation of different parts of the data model. Classes

of meta data or bundles of information (IB) are de-

ﬁned to describe the different parts of the GIIRM. In-

formation model categories exist for user proﬁle, mis-

sion description, vehicle identiﬁcation, problem de-

scription, solution and so on. These parts match the

generic workﬂow steps and are incrementally added

to the messages during the procurement process. The

messages are stateless; all relevant information is

available at any time in the process.

Listing 1: VehicleTypeIdentiﬁcation Information Bundle as

part of a MCEMessage.

<Make>

<v a lue>Volks wagen </v a l u e>

</ r e c e iv e d V a lu e>

</ s t a t u s >

</Make>

<Model>

</ r e c e iv e d V a lu e>

</ s t a t u s >

</Model>

</ V e h i c l e T y p e I d e n t i f i c a t i o n I B >

To draw an example: the user is already logged

in on the portal, the next step is choosing the mission.

The PS sends a message to the portal including a Mis-

sionDescription IB. The portal responds with the mis-

sions that are available for the current user proﬁle and

user role. For every other workﬂow step a new infor-

mation bundle is added to the message or user/system

selected values inside IBs are changed. After the iden-

tiﬁcation of the vehicle, the VehicleTypeIdentiﬁcation

IB could look like the one in Listing 1.

4 CONCLUSION

The introduction of new mobile services and appli-

cations into the automotive aftersales market will en-

able new ways of collaboration and business oppor-

tunities among car manufacturers, roadside assistance

services, workshops and e.g. the car owners who will

all get beneﬁts from it. When integrating complex

and various services into a single commercial service-

driven solution, a generic infrastructure and architec-

ture is required. Mobile clients, the core Service Por-

tal and various Remote Services enable the procure-

ment framework. They provide a market mechanism

consisting of a combination of transparent service and

information retrieval with concrete content and price

comparisons as well as e.g. cost reduction by shar-

ing the same infrastructure. To enable this interoper-

ability and collaboration between independent com-

panies, interface, communication and workﬂow deﬁ-

nitions have to be speciﬁed. The Internet is used as the

underlying connection means and offers high bene-

ﬁts regarding integration, adaptation and ubiquity. All

this contributes to MYCAREVENT meeting its main

objectives to strengthen competition and competitive-

ness among service providers in the automotive after-

sales sector.

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The research at EDM (UHasselt) is partly funded by

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ICEIS 2007 - International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems