Blog from January, 2020

GENIVI invites you to learn more about a recent GENIVI deliverable on hypervisors and virtualization in a vehicle context through an upcoming webinar, “Hypervisors in the vehicle: A standards-based approach to virtualization”.  The webinar will be held on 13 February at 1700 Central Europe Time (11:00 am US EST) in partnership with Automotive World.  Attendees of the webinar will hear from Tero Salminen, Senior Director Product, Virtualization at OpenSynergy and GENIVI Technical Lead Gunnar Andersson, about the benefits of standardization in the use of in-vehicle hypervisors.

Hypervisors and virtualization solutions are prevalent in IT and have found their way into many vertical industries.  Some hypervisor solutions are also being deployed in vehicle systems, but do these deployments allow the flexibility and interoperability that standards-based approaches typically offer for other software in the vehicle? Is there a need for a more standards-based approach for deploying hypervisors in the vehicle that has the potential to ensure that automotive requirements are met, to reduce risk and concerns among adopters of virtualization, promote portability, and to minimize system integration effort?  These and many other questions will be answered during this informative webinar.

To register for this webinar, please visit the Automotive World webinar site.  And stay tuned to other GENIVI webinars in coming months hosted by Automotive World. 

In this blog, I will highlight an important software project funded by GENIVI and completed in 2019 that aids in the interoperability of Adaptive AUTOSAR systems with systems running Franca IDL, an interface description language used by CommonAPI and other software solutions in the vehicle.

The tool, nicknamed FARACON,  uses model-to-model transformation to achieve a compatible code generation on both sides of ARA::COM (the communication layer of Adaptive AUTOSAR) and Franca IDL.  When combined with CommonAPI bindings and ARA::COM runtime, this achieves a runtime translation between ECUs. The alternative to this would be a manual translation that is not only tedious, but prone to human errors.

Using such a tool makes it possible to have a specification in a single format (GENIVI proposes Franca IDL for this), and yet to use the full advantage of both technologies on both sides of the communication.  Enabling interoperability between heterogeneous systems using model-to-model transformation methods can improve software quality and reduce development time and engineering costs.

The FARACON tool implements transformations from Adaptive AUTOSAR models to Franca IDL and vice versa. These transformations can be used as part of any current Eclipse IDE. For build automation and Continuous Integration (CI), it is also useful to deploy the transformations as a command-line tool.  

The goal of the automatic transformations is to apply code generation by AUTOSAR-compatible code generators as well as Franca-compatible generators (e.g., CommonAPI C++) in a way that leads to transparent communication between both systems at runtime. Therefore, the tooling is based on a proper mapping between Adaptive AUTOSAR concepts and Franca IDL concepts. For example, each operation on an AUTOSAR service interface is mapped to a method in Franca IDL.

The diagram above shows how the transformation tooling interacts with the code generators. The generated code on the AUTOSAR and Linux-based subsystems (like GENIVI) is using the SOME/IP protocol for communication. As the subsystems are integrated on model level, the communication is automatically compatible.

A clear advantage of following this approach is that there is no need to define the same interface twice in Franca IDL and AUTOSAR ARXML. This reduces errors coming from manually maintaining the service interfaces by having only one source of origin.

GENIVI is proud to have funded the FARACON tool through Itemis and Version 1.0 (open source licensed), which achieves a near production-ready quality, is available here: https://github.com/GENIVI/franca_ara_tools.  The delivery of this useful tool to the industry is one evidence that GENIVI has moved beyond IVI and is actively working on the integration of multiple operating systems in the connected and centralized vehicle cockpit.

Many thanks to GENIVI members Itemis, Renault and Visteon for their work to oversee, develop, test and publish the tool.

Welcome to the New Year and to a new model of communicating about GENIVI plans, activities and deliverables.  GENIVI is phasing out the newsletter and will begin using this blog (coordinated with email blasts) to inform members of the alliance and nonmembers about important topics.  Future blogs will be more often and shorter to facilitate a quick read.  Please feel free to pass on a link of this blog to your colleagues to keep them aware of all that is going on in GENIVI.  In this blog, I will briefly describe the awesome outcome of the GENIVI activities at the CES 2020 show and also recap some of the latest deliverables of the alliance.  Stay tuned to this blog for more details in the coming weeks.

CES 2020 Highlights

The best way to describe the outcome of the CES 2020 Showcase and Reception is to reprint a quote from a participating member company that had a table presence at the showcase:

"I wanted to tell you that we absolutely LOVED the GENIVI reception.  My team felt your event ALONE was worth the plane tickets from Finland to CES.  It was a fantastic venue and we had so much interest and traction there...We had a great time and had a lot of great talks and leads."  

I was fortunate to receive many such remarks during the closing of the reception from almost everyone I talked to.  Big kudos to Mike Nunnery (GENIVI Mike) for his hard work planning and executing this event!  Once again it broke all previous records for registration (2,000), actual participation (roughly 1,400),  as well as numbers of sponsors and organizations taking tables during the reception.  This is one way that GENIVI  brings our members together and provides a productive environment for business interactions with a well-qualified audience of automotive decision makers from around the globe.  Pictures of the reception can be found here. 

Two more opportunities for similar interaction are coming, one being the All Member Meeting (targeted for the week of 11 May in a European location TBC) and the TU-Automotive Detroit event (3-4 June).  For details about sponsoring or showcasing at either event, please contact Mike at mikenunnery at comcast.net.  

Two other quick notes on CES 2020.  GENIVI teamed with SAE to produce the Connect2Car program during CES and all the panels coordinated by GENIVI enjoyed full rooms of eager listeners.  John Ellis led a panel on Connected Services and Matt Jones led an interesting discussion on Electrification and Autonomy.  Pictures of these panels can be found here.  

Latest Deliverables from GENIVI

CES 2020 also provided a nice milestone for several GENIVI projects to deliver on work completed in 2019.  This wiki page provides an overview and links to each delivery, but let me highlight a few here.  

Vehicle Data Models - Overview and Gap Analysis

Everyone is talking about vehicle data, but the industry is not aligned on a standard data model or common approach for moving vehicle data to/from the back-end cloud.  Step one in this essential model alignment is to understand existing approaches and the gaps present in them.  The Cloud and Connected Services project recently published a “Vehicle Data Models - Overview and Gap Analysis” that provides readers important information for the future data-oriented strategies of OEMs and their suppliers.  The project now turns toward designing an end-to-end reference architecture during its next "sprint".  At this point, the project is open to members and nonmembers so if you would like to get involved, contact Philippe Robin, GENIVI PMO lead at philippe.robin at technoveo.com.  

Automotive Virtualization Specification 

As I stood at the GENIVI table during the CES reception, I was amazed at the interest in another recent deliverable of the Hypervisor Project, an Automotive Virtualization Specification.  Hypervisors and virtualization solutions are prevalent in IT and have found their way into many vertical industries.  Some hypervisor solutions are also being deployed in vehicle systems, but do these deployments allow the flexibility and interoperability that standards-based approaches typically offer for other software in the vehicle? GENIVI believes that there is a need for a more standards-based approach for deploying hypervisors in the vehicle.  This has the potential to ensure that automotive requirements are met, to reduce risk and concerns among adopters of virtualization, promote portability, and to minimize system integration effort.   This is the motivation behind the Automotive Virtualization Specification, recently delivered by GENIVI (special thanks to OpenSynergy and Gunnar Andersson).  The specification is considered a "release candidate" meaning that you have the opportunity to contribute your thoughts to a final release.  Contact Gunnar to give your input at gandersson at genivi.org. GENIVI will hold a webinar on this subject in mid-February and the details will be announced soon.  

There is so much more to share, but I promised to keep it short.  But stay tuned for our next blog as we will make at least two very important announcements in the days ahead.

All the best in this New Year,

Steve Crumb

Executive Director, GENIVI Alliance