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Open and Royalty-Free
Further, COVESA aspires to be an open and royalty-free organization. The discussions and contributions made during this session are governed by the COVESA Intellectual Property policy. If you are unfamiliar with that policy, please review it in detail prior to making any contribution that reads upon a patent.

Meeting Notes 2025

30rd January 2025

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Meeting Notes

• Participants: COVESA, Paradox Cat, BMW, FORVIA, Appning by FORVIA, Tietoevry, Volvo, General Motors, Elektrobit, Allianz, Renesas, Geotab
• Summary on AOSP VHAL Properties (Vehicle Hardware Abstraction Layer giving access to car data),
  mapped from VSS data (https://covesa.global/project/vehicle-signal-specification/):
  • the aim is to get car data, called properties, to the headunit.
  • Standard Vehicle/System Properties for Android Open Source Project (AOSP) are defined in https://developer.android.com/reference/android/car/VehiclePropertyIds (65K Ids possible).
  • Android Automotive also offers the definition of custom "vendor" properties (65K Ids possible) which are restricted to system apps: https://source.android.com/docs/automotive/vhal/previous/properties#handling-custom-properties
  • Third party Android apps have access to system properties. 
  • Third party apps have to be aware of the capabilities of the respective VHAL they are accessing.
  • Data specified in VSS can be mapped to the VHAL system properties, as long as the respective property already exists.
• The question is, how to bridge the gap between additional VSS-data and already existing VHAL properties for third party apps - there are 3 ways which can be evaluated and applied for to avoid further fragmentation:
  • extension of the system properties.
  • extension of AOSP to offer the same permissions for standard vehicle and custom vendor properties.
  • new category in property metadata named "VSS" with re-use of standard system properties space.
• Handling of permissions can be done in the manifest (once) or during run-time of the app, also in various degrees up to handling explicit user permissions where needed. It has to be evaluated, if the granularity, security and the flexibility of permissions as of today will be enough to handle future 3rd party use cases.
• A possible solution has to be evaluated regarding backwards compatibility to older Android versions.
• Authentication has to be evaluated thoroughly, e.g. can tokens as used in VISS (https://covesa.global/project/vehicle-information-service-specification/) be applied.
• For further information and evaluation, take a look at the demos given already in past COVESA All Member meetings, e.g. VISS POC in https://wiki.covesa.global/display/WIK4/COVESA+All+Member+Meeting+~+April+16-18%2C+2024. Implementation example as well in https://mobex.io/webinars/reaching-software-defined-vehicle-level-5-with-eb-corbos-link.
• First step to set up a first project / Proof of concept, check on data needed for some first use cases with the aim to offer a reference implementation in the COVESA AOSP SDK (BMW Co-Chair to start this).
    

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• See Next Steps Below

23rd January 2025 Kickoff Minutes

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