Implementing Situation Awareness for Car-to-X Applications Using Domain Specific Languages

Car-to-X i.e. Car-to-Anything communication based on standardized IEEE 802.11p radio technology is comprised with wireless communication between cars (Car-to-Car) and between vehicles and the environment (Car-to-Infrastructure). In order to develop Car-to-X applications based on this standard one needs to model parameters such as the vehicle´s position, velocity, acceleration etc. and parameters of the vehicle´s environment. Typically, the underlying domain models are designed in an ad-hoc manner and the domain rules become hard-coded into the source- code of the application software. In this paper we describe an alternative and more flexible approach. The model is described in almost plain English using a Domain Specific Language (DSL) and translated into target code via parser technology based on the ANTLR tool-chain. This provides more flexibility not only in creating and maintaining the domain rules, but also with regards to generating code for entirely different target languages and technology environments. For instance, we demonstrate to generate Java code for a simulation environment and C-code for the embedded device from the same rule definitions.