Active-Code Replacement in the OODIDA Data Analytics Platform
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OODIDA (On-board/Off-board Distributed Data Analytics) is a platform for distributing and executing concurrent data analysis tasks. It targets a fleet of reference vehicles in the automotive industry and has a particular focus on rapid prototyping. Its underlying message-passing infrastructure has been implemented in Erlang/OTP, but the external applications for user interaction and carrying out data analysis tasks use a language-independent JSON interface. These applications are primarily implemented in Python. A data analyst interacting with OODIDA uses a Python library. The bulk of the data analytics tasks are performed by clients (on-board), while a central server performs supplementary tasks (off-board). OODIDA can be automatically packaged and deployed, which necessitates restarting parts of the system, or all of it. This is potentially disruptive. To address this issue, we added the ability to execute user-defined Python modules on both the client and the server, which can be replaced without restarting any part of the system. Modules can even be swapped between iterations of an ongoing assignment. This facilitates use cases such as iterative A/B testing of machine learning algorithms or deploying experimental algorithms on-the-fly. Active-code replacement is a key feature of our system as well as an example of interoperability between a functional and a non-functional programming language.
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