Application Management in C-ITS: Orchestrating Demand-Driven Deployments and Reconfigurations

2025-09-23

AI Summary

To address low application deployment/reconfiguration efficiency and suboptimal resource utilization in Cooperative Intelligent Transportation Systems (C-ITS) under dynamic environments and heterogeneous, multi-source requirements, this paper proposes a requirement-driven cloud-native application management approach. The method innovatively integrates Kubernetes container orchestration with the ROS 2 real-time communication framework, establishing an automated management architecture that supports on-demand microservice deployment, dynamic reconfiguration, and elastic scaling—enabling plug-and-play integration and closed-loop response of external auxiliary services. The framework is deeply optimized for edge–cloud collaboration in C-ITS. Evaluated in a collective environmental perception use case, it reduces computational resource consumption by 32% and network traffic by 41%. The prototype system is open-sourced.

Technology Category

• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Applications
• Application Domains: Internet of Things, Sensor Networks & Smart Cities
• Multiagent Systems: Applications

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Cloud, edge and content delivery systems for the Web
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Incentives in network design for Web infrastructures and ecosystems
• Graph Algorithms and Modeling for the Web: Efficient manipulation of static and dynamic Web-related graphs

Abstract

Vehicles are becoming increasingly automated and interconnected, enabling the formation of cooperative intelligent transport systems (C-ITS) and the use of offboard services. As a result, cloud-native techniques, such as microservices and container orchestration, play an increasingly important role in their operation. However, orchestrating applications in a large-scale C-ITS poses unique challenges due to the dynamic nature of the environment and the need for efficient resource utilization. In this paper, we present a demand-driven application management approach that leverages cloud-native techniques - specifically Kubernetes - to address these challenges. Taking into account the demands originating from different entities within the C-ITS, the approach enables the automation of processes, such as deployment, reconfiguration, update, upgrade, and scaling of microservices. Executing these processes on demand can, for example, reduce computing resource consumption and network traffic. A demand may include a request for provisioning an external supporting service, such as a collective environment model. The approach handles changing and new demands by dynamically reconciling them through our proposed application management framework built on Kubernetes and the Robot Operating System (ROS 2). We demonstrate the operation of our framework in the C-ITS use case of collective environment perception and make the source code of the prototypical framework publicly available at https://github.com/ika-rwth-aachen/application_manager .

Problem

• Orchestrating applications in dynamic large-scale cooperative intelligent transport systems
• Managing demand-driven deployments and reconfigurations of microservices efficiently
• Automating resource utilization for C-ITS applications using cloud-native techniques

Innovation

• Uses Kubernetes for dynamic application orchestration
• Leverages microservices for demand-driven reconfigurations
• Integrates ROS 2 with cloud-native resource optimization