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

22nd February 2023

Agenda:

• Workshop debrief
  • Do we have agreement on some high level points?
    • Acceptance of the zone arch diagram from Miro
    • Creation of Data Arch / Pattern
      • Outline:

        • Document Goals, Motivations, Questions - Stephen, Andre, Christian, Adnan

        • Illustrate Design Patterns - Stephen, Andre, Christian, Adnan

        • POC Definition [ongoing] - Stephen, Andre, Christian, Adnan

• Arch / Pattern outline Qs
  • General approach / form

Minutes:

• Debrief
  • General agreement around the high level arch diagram and results from the workshop.
  • Ulf: Detail - Revisit arched line from computing to HU in top level diagram
  • Ulf: More than one arch may be possible, e.g. data centric, interface centric (e.g. CCS centricity around VISS)
• Roadmap
  • Steve outlined some possible approaches to describing a data architecture and associated patterns electronically.
    • As discussed in the workshop moving from the general (Goals, Motivations, Questions) to specifics such as Design Patterns and Touchpoint illustrations.
  • Andre will have internal discussion about this
  • Goal remains to build out a work plan

15th February 2023

• Normal hourly meeting cancelled in favor of two afternoons (Weds, Thurs) of workshops to advance the general data architecture discussion.
• See Miro https://miro.com/app/board/uXjVPoh2zow=/

8th February 2023

• Two themes:

  • The general data centric data architecture pattern
    • Motivations/goals
    • Key questions to be answered
    • Data domains:
      • Autosar, Telematic, IVI, etc
    • Data characterisation:
  • More descriptive/prescriptive orientations of the pattern for specific use cases or touchpoints
    • e.g. Android touch-point:
      • Methods of signal abstraction via VHAL or VSS Data Server
      • App connection via cloud and in-vehicle
• Workshop
  • Agreement building
    • Opening
      • Motivations/goals
      • Key questions to be answered
    • Data domains:
  • Roadmap

1st February 2023

• Useful long discussion on finding common ground. Overran by 30 mins.
• Recognition that a workshop soon would be useful to facilitate longer discussion.
• Working towards this 'central text' Design Pattern
  • Data model and technology agnostic
  • Capable of supporting multiple touch points from same arch (robust, flexible etc)
  • Capable of multiple data domains sharing same data m/w
  • Explain requirements but avoid deep heavy specification setting
  • Vehicle is not a single IT blob. Need to engage with reality of requirements from different domains in outlining use cases and touch points: Hard RT vs needs of Analytics, signal read vs storage for processing.

25th January 2023

• Steve: Let's continue discussion of BMW presentation with goal of moving towards a roadmap
• Christian is waiting for permission to make presentation public
• Christian: Requirements are definitely an interesting collaboration point for us
• Felix: Alternative approaches to meet the requirements
• Ulf: I've forwarded the presentation within Ford waiting for feedback
• Christian: Slide 7
  • Important point is the architecture supporting other data models and personal data (arch not be VSS specific)
  • VSSo not just for data integration but enabling knowledge transfer
• Steve: to my mind we seem to be moving towards a central design pattern from which others and implementations may be spun off
• Proposal sketch: Design Pattern: Data Centric Arch including requirements
  • Patterns for Touchpoints
  • Implementations/PoCs proving such
    • e.g Realm showing VSS sync via middleware
• General agreement this makes sense.
• Ulf: The implementation section matches what I am working on in Ford
• Next steps:
  
  • Start to plan the central Design Pattern

18th January 2023

Agenda:

• BMW presenting input for the roadmap

• Adnan/Christian Muehlbauer from BMW presented their input into the early 2023 roadmap
  • Presentation: 2023_01_18_COVESA_Data_Middleware_V2.0.pptx
  • Initial discussion during the remaining time shows overlap in interests between participants. Needs expanding upon. Participants commit to returning next week to continue discussions.
  • Shows in part the usefulness of the proposed longer workshops which might take some of the questions and requirements raised and provide the time for longer discussion.

11th January 2023

(Paul's notes from the meeting)

• Adnan - will bring in arch and use cases for next meeting including use cases
• Goal is to settle on piece that is useful and focus on a piece of the architecture
• Setting up direction for data architecture
  • Setup high level arch
  • Requirements - like objectbox.io
  • List use cases
  • In workshop provide hands on experience
• What is the initial purpose? What are we trying to
  get?
  • Exploring solutions to data architecture
  • Learning how things are built and Thought
    leadership!
  • What solutions look like when provided requirements
  • Learn how to shape with requirements then look at what solutions
  • Community requirements
  • Let vendors show their solutions
• Christian will provide first proposal
• Ted
  • Be able to receive data from OEM - $0.60 a month - Curve logging
  • Want to work on TCU’s directly
  • Willing to work with us
• Adnan - How to improve data handling between car and cloud.
• Stephen - use 80% vss but need to be able to handle other data in addition

4th January 2023

Agenda:

• Continue roadmap discussion including possibility of virtual workshop

• Thoughts over xmas?
  • Ulf has been considering his thin API proposal over xmas and will update in the next Autosar sync call. Has proposal to extend beyond data into procedure calls for services.
  • Steve repeated his intention to resume work on extending state storage to support time series DBs including Apache IoTDB
• Discussion of connection between state storage, VSS servers and the proposed vehicle API

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.