Architecture and Infrastructure Meeting Minutes

The minutes of the meetings for the Data Architecture and Infrastructure pillar of the Data Expert Group.

Historical note: the minutes for the previous project, the CVII Tech Stack, can be found here: CVII Technology Stack meeting notes

7th December 2022

• EG project announcements
  • Update on Autosar Collaboration
• Xmas break
  • Steve can only remotely phone in next week, which would be the last meeting before Xmas. Nic can't make it.
  • Decision taken to break for Xmas early. This is the last meeting of the year. Thanks to all who contributed.
  • Request: think about the Design Pattern goals over xmas
• Data Arch Theme discussion
  • Proposal to hold a virtual workshop for multiple hours early next year to accelerate the design pattern discussion.

30th November 2022

• Project status
  • Majority of VSS call taken up with VSS struct support discussion. Best practices good/bad one of the focus points next.
  • Ted summarised VISS/VSSo updates
• Data Arch Theme discussion
  • GraphQL
    • Andre: Nice for query. Problematic to have generalised set method. Have to do heavy development in schema for setter. Complicates cross vehicle model support.
    • GraphQL still of interest in the tech landscape but VISS is the more obvious first priority
  • Discussion of existing high level in-vehicle data architecture diagram. What it was created for and its limitations.
  • Ulf showed how his V2C proposal could address data needs
  • (Data) Design Patterns
    • Discussion of in-vehicle architecture leads back to the existing topic of local data reduction at the edge/within function and smart exchange between functions
      • Local processing generating higher logic data possibly at lower frequency, e.g. engine management does local monitoring and then externally reports decisions
      • Reduces in-vehicle network traffic
      • Reduces costs associated with data transmission to the cloud
      • This is an obvious candidate for a design pattern: benefits, how it may be done, VSS/VISS role in that.

23rd November 2022

• Project status
  • VSS struct support heads up
  • VSSo meetings have restarted
  • Status of the collaboration between Covesa and Autosar and work on Autosar Gateway/Vehicle API
• Data Arch Themes
  • Given prior input on peoples interest Steve outlined an early roadmap for work that could create both PoCs and data patterns and which is easily adopted into related Covesa projects such as the Autosar Gateway and Android.
    
    • VSS Data Server
      • GraphQL (Covesa C++)
      • VISS Data Server
      • Aim: demonstrating two possibilities
    • VSS Data Store
      • Connection to Data Server
      • Embedded app DB (e.g. Realm), 'full' DB (e.g. IoTDB)
      • Aim: demonstrating two possibilities
    • Target: x86 (e.g container) => embedded h/w
  • Discussion:
    • Piotr: suggests adding VM to x86 targets as it allows investigation of concepts like VirtIO that may be harder in containers
    • Ulf: It makes sense to follow a pluggable architecture
    • Piotr makes the good point that the data architecture diagrams will need to evolve to cover higher function needs such as the proposed Vehicle API as well as the current coverage for data.
• AoB
  • Ulf presented his proposal for a thin API approach to the Vehicle API requirements for the Autosar collaboration.
    • This is not yet public. He will work on enabling that with goal to present it to the Autosar working group once it gets going.

16th November 2022

• Brief recap of Covesa project status
• Continuing discussion of future work
  • Paul: what would people like to see?
    • Felix: interested in GraphQL and connection of databases as data back-end. Along with what benefits data store may enable, e.g. processing at the edge.
    • Nick: ability for apps devs to discover what signals are available and on what terms, e.g. frequency.
  • Answered Felix's question about what work had gone on before.
  • Future is very much open to be set by the group. Cloud needs picking up again - with VSS/VISS now established the original work on CCS could move to other aspects. In-vehicle the component landscape is sketched but much work to be done selecting patterns based on data needs.
  • Steve showed a draft high level data arch diagram showing the proposed Autosar gateway communicating with QM data architecture.
  • Agreement that the interest around data architecture presented and discussed at the AMM is a useful starting point both for PoC investigation and likely creation of data patterns. Let's continue the discussions with a view to creating a strategy.

9th November 2022

• Introductions as we have newcomers Felix Reichenbach (MongoDB) and Francois Ozog (Shokubai.tech)
• Project updates
  • Steve summarises VSS, VSC, VSSo status and EG Leadership discussions around governance and project reporting
• Roadmap
  • Discussion of possible data patterns. What are people interested in?
    • Felix: One area is GraphQL data server shown in the architecture. Would be interesting to have embedded implementation backending to data store.
      • Steve outlines some of the work to date on that including the GraphQL libraries in the Covesa github.
    • Francois outlines his interests around function abstractions.
      • Steve summarises work in that area in Covesa and suggests background reading.