Blog from January, 2023

Yu Fang, Co-Founder and CTO, Sonatus

Sudhir Dhankhar, Director of Engineering - Cloud, Sonatus

Vehicles are undergoing an incredible period of transformation with many different aspects of vehicles changing at the same time.  The rapid growth of electrification of vehicles is simplifying the vehicle design and promoting a transition to new E/E architectures.  Moving away from the old approach of discrete ECU’s doing individual functions, ECU’s are also consolidating into domains and sharing compute resources, reducing vehicle cost.  Driver experiences are expanding, including radical improvements in driver assistance and driving automation, improved entertainment, as well vehicle personalization. Software innovation underpins every aspect of these many areas of evolution and vehicle software is becoming more advanced and complex as vehicles shift towards becoming Software-Defined Vehicles (or SDV).

Vehicles are also becoming more connected, with services and capabilities connected to, and benefiting from, the cloud.  This flow of data improves the user experience and enables a wider array of innovations. The Connected Vehicle Systems Alliance (COVESA) is an important industry initiative that is working to bring standards to connected vehicles and promote the rapid development of these technologies.  Sonatus is a member of COVESA and has adopted the Vehicle Signal Specification (VSS). To help explain the importance of VSS, it may be useful to give some context about Sonatus.  

At Sonatus, we’re accelerating vehicle software innovation by delivering key software building blocks that enable OEMs to shift to software-defined vehicles faster and at lower costs.  These building blocks allow OEMs to continually improve and enhance their vehicles at any time, even after they are sold.  Sonatus offers a range of products and solutions to speed vehicle manufacturers' journey towards SDV in areas like data collection, vehicle automation, vehicle networking, cybersecurity and others.

SDV brings many valuable benefits to vehicle OEMs, suppliers, and customers:

• SDV enables issues to be fixed and functionality to be added to the vehicle post-production.
• SDV’s offer improved vehicle safety (including vehicle security), reliability, & maintainability.
• The flexibility that SDV’s bring enables new services that improve ownership experience and can save cost.

But to realize these benefits, OEMs need to enable application development both within the OEM and from the vehicle ecosystem. Most of these applications rely on access to quality, fine-grained data from vehicles and ability to add new features, but today sharing that data has challenges:

1. It is impractical to send all vehicle data to the cloud all the time, as the transmission and storage costs would be prohibitive.
2. Traditional software updates to vehicles are through cumbersome Over The Air (OTA) updates, which require significant development and testing, not to mention challenges in deploying the large updates across a fleet. This reduces the speed of innovation.
3. The naming of the vehicle signals changes from one vehicle model to another and also is different between different brands which makes it difficult for developers to build applications that can span multiple vehicle models and brands.

Two of Sonatus’s solutions aim to address these first two key challenges and enable faster vehicle innovation: Vehicle Data Collection (VDC) and Vehicle Automation Manager (VAM).

Sonatus Vehicle Data Collector enables vehicle manufacturers to create fine-grained, customized collection policies that give them the precise data they need and under specific trigger conditions. Through customized fine-grained data collection, OEMs can achieve an array of valuable use cases like predictive maintenance, diagnostics, product planning, cost optimization, and much more. VDC’s solution operates in the vehicle as well as in the cloud.

Sonatus Vehicle Automation Manager builds on our data collection capabilities but also adds actions. Through VAM, OEMs can create new features and experiences at any point in the vehicle’s life or automate the testing of existing functions by simply defining workflows using lightweight, yet flexible policies. VAM enables developers to draw upon data from across the car, and take actions in many vehicle systems, all without coding and difficult validation.

But the third challenge of inconsistent signal naming can remain a barrier. Sonatus VDC & VAM leverage VSS from COVESA to overcome this: VSS defines a common data model for vehicle signals, sensors, actuators, and attributes.  This common framework is critical both in the vehicle and in the cloud.  VSS offers multiple benefits to different layers of the value chain:

• Interoperability: VSS ensures that different vehicles, infrastructure and devices can communicate with each other, regardless of the brand or technology. For example, the signal sharing vehicle speed may be different across models or OEMs. In VSS it receives the common name Vehicle.Speed, making it easier to consistently access the correct signal across models and OEMs.
• Reduced Operational Overhead: With VSS, OEMs and their partners can define & deploy one data collection policy to collect data without worrying about different models and brands.
• Safety: VSS can be used to improve safety by enabling vehicles to share information about their location, speed, etc., in a brand agnostic way allowing other vehicles and infrastructure to respond appropriately.
• Innovation: VSS enables application developers to build innovative brand/model agnostic applications using common standards.
• Reduced Costs: With VSS, since naming is brand and model agnostic, it can result in improved software reuse and thus lower development costs.

For Sonatus, we have had a positive experience with VSS and see the scalability and reuse benefits it provides. We are excited to be one of the leaders in helping bring this technology to market and hope, through our advocacy, we can help demonstrate the benefits of the wider adoption of VSS across the industry.

To learn more on how Sonatus is implementing VSS, please join the COVESA Spotlight presentation on February 2 at 10 am PT / 1900 CET. Join using the Webex link.

Colleagues and friends ask, every year, “What was the most interesting thing you saw at CES this year?”  Some years it can be a challenge to answer, since there are so many cool and interesting things shown at CES.  This year it was very clear.  The most interesting thing I saw at CES was the growing adoption and awareness of COVESA’s Vehicle Signal Specification (VSS). VSS is a common data model used in and out of the vehicle to enable, facilitate, speed and scale of development of applications and services across OEM vehicle models, between OEMs, and third-party ecosystems. In the vehicle, data is typically mapped to VSS as close to the source as possible. It is also used in the cloud. This data is exposed by platforms to be used in services, applications, analytics, machine learning, digital twins, and simulations.

Not only are companies adopting VSS, but they have sincere interest in collaboration to improve, mature and grow its usefulness.   

Member companies that showcased their VSS implementations on the show floor at CES:

• RTI Connext - Data-centric communications framework
• Sonatus - In-vehicle infrastructure and data management solutions

Other companies that showcased their VSS implementations on the show floor at CES:

• Amazon Web Services (AWS) for Automotive - In-vehicle, cloud and cloud-to-vehicle services and solutions
• AWS Fleetwise - Collect, transform, and transfer vehicle data to the cloud in near realtime
• Blackberry IVY - Cloud-connected automotive AI platform

There were many others interested in and using VSS and areas where VSS is a clear fit for larger adoption (e.g., Electric Vehicles (EV) and EV Charging).

For more information about VSS can be found here and if interested in learning more, please contact me.  We welcome your active participation in VSS-related activities and here’s to further adoption and maturation of VSS in 2023!  

CES returned from a multi-year, COVID-induced hiatus with a vengeance!  The success of that event positively impacted the COVESA Showcase and Reception event held on 5 January at the Bellagio Hotel. COVESA smashed records for booths/tables taken (77) and for confirmed attendance by a targeted automotive audience (1780), both of which represent a roughly 25% increase from the previous, pre-COVID records for the event.  An extensive photo gallery of the event can be found here.

COVESA is very grateful to all the event sponsors (listed in the below graphic), to the showcase participants and to Mike Nunnery, COVESA Business Development Manager, and his entire team for their excellent logistical execution. Another special thanks goes to the Michigan Economic Development Corporation (MEDC) and the Michigan Office of Future Mobility and Electrification, both of which added significantly to the event by accommodating a start-up pavilion and by hosting the Lt. Governor of the State of Michigan, Mr. Garlin Gilchirst II, who welcomed the crowd during a brief on-stage speech.

New to the event this year was AUTOSAR, an automotive alliance that has established a de-facto industry standard for an automotive software architecture, and their PiCar demonstrator. For this event, COVESA member TietoEvry extended the AUTOSAR demonstrator to include an integration of the Vehicle Signal Specification (VSS).

This integration is an early reference of an AUTOSAR concept to develop a Vehicle API connecting the AUTOSAR adaptive platform to vehicle data formatted according to VSS. The demonstrator gave of glimpse of the progress made in the COVESA-AUTOSAR alignment discussions announced in October of 2022.

COVESA was happy to provide a high-profile event with a very targeted audience to 25 of its showcasing members, some of which had just recently joined the alliance. In addition to AUTOSAR’s presence, the event served as an alignment opportunity to other industry collaborations including eSync Alliance (OTA standards), OpenADR (energy management and EV charging), Society of Automotive Engineers and the National Association of Broadcasters (advancing new content in the vehicle).  A table was also dedicated to Vehicle Experiences, a new COVESA Birds-of-a-Feather (BoF) launching in February.

While CES 2023 was a much more populated event that had a positive effect on COVESA’s showcase and reception, the showcase had significant highlights of its own, not only in participation and sponsorship, but in strengthening relationships between industry-leading collaborations and, of course, gave 25 of our members an awesome platform for showing their products and services. We invite all of our members to consider participating in next year’s event and in other showcase events at our upcoming all member meetings.

Thanks again to our sponsors, participating organizations and to Mike Nunnery’s team for a record-breaking event – let’s do it again next year!