With Christoph Ludewig, VP OEM EMEA, and Ted Guild, Connectivity Standards Lead at Geotab

What does your company do? What services, or products, do you provide?

Geotab is a global leader in IoT (Internet of Things) and connected transportation technology, servicing 3.7M vehicles across the globe (07/2023) with 2,200 employees. The company specializes in providing advanced fleet management solutions for businesses of all sizes. Geotab's core offering revolves around vehicle data, captured either by an aftermarket device or a direct OEM connection. This data includes vehicle diagnostics, GPS location, fuel usage, driver behavior, and more. Geotab's platform then processes this information to generate actionable insights and reports, enabling businesses to optimize their fleet operations, improve safety, reduce fuel consumption, enhance maintenance practices, and increase overall efficiency.

Why did you join COVESA and how long has your company been a member?

Geotab believes that standardization enables innovation, as development energy and resources should be allocated to product development, not integration of heterogeneous systems. COVESA paves the path in this direction and Geotab is actively contributing to this.

What benefits does your participation in COVESA bring to your company and business? 

Geotab benefits from participating in COVESA in several ways, ensuring our and our customers (major fleet operators) perspectives are represented in technical solutions being discussed, proposing ideas towards those solutions, increasing our exposure as a thought leader in connected vehicle space, and establishing contacts for prospective business collaborations.

Which COVESA collaborative project(s) or Birds of a Feather (BoF) is your company engaged in and why is that beneficial to your business?

Geotab participates on COVESA’s Board of Directors, Vehicle Signal Specification, Data Expert Group, Technical Steering Team, AOSP Whitelabel Marketplace, EV Charge Event Aggregation, Vehicle Service Catalog, and Commercial Vehicles Birds of a Feather.

COVESA has been successful in convening core stakeholders across the industry, constructing thoughtful solutions, and promoting widespread adoption. We look forward to the continued success of this organization and are happy to be a part of it.

With Matt Jones, Director of Global Technology Strategy at Ford Motor Company

Why did your company join COVESA?

As an industry leader in the automotive market, Ford Motor Company recognizes the importance of open standards for vehicle signals. We believe that by adopting COVESA's Vehicle Signal Specification (VSS), we can promote cross-interoperability and facilitate innovation in the industry.

Why is COVESA important to the industry?

In today's world of connected vehicles, it is essential that we have a common language for communication between different systems. The COVESA VSS project provides a standardized way for vehicles to communicate with each other, as well as with infrastructure and other devices. By using open standards, we can avoid the fragmentation of the market and ensure that all vehicles can communicate effectively.

What are the benefits of open standards what benefits does your participation in COVESA bring to your company and business? 

One of the key benefits of open standards is that they promote competition and innovation. By using a common set of standards, companies can focus on creating new and innovative products and services, rather than spending time and resources on developing proprietary solutions. This can lead to faster product development, greater efficiency, and ultimately, better products for consumers.

In addition, open standards can help to reduce costs and improve efficiency. By adopting a common set of standards, we can avoid the need for expensive custom solutions and reduce the time and effort required to integrate different systems. This can lead to faster time-to-market, lower costs, and improved overall performance.

By supporting open standards like the COVESA VSS project, we can continue to drive innovation and progress in the automotive industry. We urge other companies to join us in supporting open standards and to take advantage of the resources available through our developer.ford.com site. Together, we can build a better future for the industry and deliver better products and services to our customers.

Organizations interested in joining COVESA can visit covesa.global/join and information about technical participation in COVESA projects can be found on the COVESA Wiki.

By Ulf Björkengren, Senior Software Architect, Ford

The Vehicle Information Service Specification version 2(VISSv2) developed in the W3C is a service for accessing vehicle data, reading from sensors, or writing to actuators on the vehicle's network. It exposes this data using a hierarchical tree-like taxonomy defined in COVESA Vehicle Signal Specification (VSS). The service provides the data in JSON format. The service may reside in the vehicle, or on servers on the internet with information already brought off the vehicle.

VISSv2 specifies three transport protocols that are allowed to be used in client-to-server communication. The Websocket and MQTT alternatives are payload compatible, so a client can issue requests over either of these transport protocols without modification of the payload. HTTP where the path information is explicit in the URL is not fully payload compatible. In a typical scenario, the server is deployed on a high-performance ECU running Linux, and clients can either be deployed off-vehicle (e.g., in the cloud or on a mobile device in proximity of the vehicle), or in-vehicle then typically on another HPC ECU, or the IVI ECU.

As described above, the VISSv2 specification supports a wide array of scenarios but there are of course scenarios not covered. To fill a bit of this gap, an experimental addition of gRPC support besides the other transport protocol alternatives can now be found on the VISSv2 reference implementation. The implementation is payload compatible with the Websocket and MQTT alternatives, and it can be configured to run over TLS. Using protobuf for the serialization, the payload is after protobuf encoding in binary format and obviously not identical on byte level to the others where the payloads have text format. But after protobuf decoding on the receiver side, the payload is again identical also on the byte level. So, a client making use of the protobuf transcoding interface can use the same payloads on any of these transport protocols.

 The reference implementation contains a client test implementation written in Golang that uses this transcoding.

Adding gRPC to the suite of transport protocols that VISSv2 supports gives a client implementer a wider choice in finding a protocol that meets the needs of the client use case.

Whether this transport protocol will be added to the coming W3C standard is at this point not decided, but if you believe it should after testing it on the reference implementation, you can mail your support for it to Paul Boyes, COVESA’s Community Director.   

With Kraig Angel, Vice President of Automotive at MAVI.io

What does your company do? What services, or products, do you provide? 
Mavi.io’s OnMyWay™ Commerce brings easy, curated shopping to the dashboards of customers’ vehicles. OnMyWay payment-enabled Connected Cars meet the needs of “immediate purchase” customers integrating location, ordering, product recommendation, payment, and pickup. Mavi.io’s ‘OnMyWay’ Shopping To Be Enabled By New Smart Car Dashboards (Forbes.com) MAVI’s Mobile Retail Network™ HUB middleware marketplace connects retailers’ existing eCommerce platforms for inventory, order, timing, loyalty, and curbside orchestration to the car’s dashboard interface. Eliminating the need for retailers to integrate with each car’s unique environment. Our revenue is transaction and promotion driven, with SaaS fees as well as a B2B Fleet option that drives early revenue while consumer adoption in passenger cars grows.

Why did you join COVESA, and how long has your company been a member?
The intensity for which COVESA members are driven to improve the on-the-road and in-vehicle experience of our customers is the reason Mavi.io joined COVESA. COVESA is the premier collaboration network in the automotive industry and the only place to reach the most important thought leaders in the connected car world. Speed of innovation-to-market is essential to today’s automotive industry. COVESA is the catalyst. Mavi.io has enjoyed the immediate and vast benefits of COVESA membership since June 2022.  

What benefits does your participation in COVESA bring to your company and business? 
Mavi.io has been fortunate to be a key highlight of two COVESA events: a live in-vehicle demonstration at the event at CES in January 2023, and a live in-vehicle demonstration at the afterparty event of AutoTech in Novi in June 2023. COVESA teammates and leadership have directly engaged to foster connections with key decision makers at Automotive OEMs, Tier 1s, and potential investors. As a result, POCs have been launched and investments made… and this is only the first 12 months of membership with COVESA.

Which COVESA collaborative project(s) or Birds of a Feather (BoF) is your company engaged in, and why is that beneficial to your business?
Mavi.io is very proud to be leading the creation of the new In-vehicle Wallet Charter Project within COVESA. Furthermore, with the intent to improve the quality of life for millions of drivers around the world by providing everyday convenience from an in-vehicle experience, Mavi.io is also tracking the following collaborative projects:
●    Data Expert Group – Interface Definition
●    Electric Vehicle Charging Expert Group 
●    Android Automotive SIG
●    Vehicle Experience and Content

As an integrated App within the vehicle with the capability to connect users with retailers and make purchases from the vehicle - including EV charging locations – Mavi.io’s OnMyWay Commerce will require two-way connected vehicle communication. As a result, nearly all COVESA collaborative projects have deep appeal and alignment with our organizational goals. This is why the COVESA membership is of such great value to Mavi.io.

The entire Mavi.io team wishes to show immense gratitude and appreciation to the COVESA member organizations and their engaged leadership as well as the leaders within COVESA itself. Without all of you, our remarkable success and growth would not be possible.

By Peter Winzell, Lead Software Engineer, Volvo Cars

During the Fall All Member Meeting in Dearborn last year, I presented some ideas around vehicle signal set matching.  This is the problem we face when we need to have proprietary vehicle signals translated into Vehicle Signal Specification.  This matching/mapping is a challenge the industry faces today and can take a significant amount of time to do manually. By using vehicle signal attributes such as name, description, unit, and datatype we proposed an algorithm that would be used to estimate just how close two signals from two disjunctive sets are. The algorithm can be summarized just by a simple formula like this:

p is a number between 0..1, where the closer you get to 1, the more likely you will have signals that match.   

To improve on this (original paper: Ideas for Vehicle Signal Set Matchingt) I have some new ideas presented in a paper: Dynamic Weight Generation for Vehicle Signal Set Matching. Here we are replacing static weights that are used to value attributes with some functions that increase the weight depending on the result of a more highly ranked attribute. I decided to value the description attribute higher and use that value for the weight generation. We want the weight to reflect when we believe we have a match, but also at the same time reflect when we believe we do not have a match. This will make sure that units such as m/s are dynamically valued and should prove a better result when we rank matching candidates – at least that is the theory.

The paper explores 3 different mathematical one-variable functions with different complexity. I added a test to see how the different functions handle the comparison where we have signals that match and those that don’t although they share the same unit.  

I welcome discussion and would like engage with others in solving this problem and turn it into a COVESA project.  Please reach out, via COVESA Community Director if interested.

With Adam Konopa, Technology Director, Mobility at Intellias

What does your company do? What services, or products, do you provide?  

Intellias is a global technology partner with over 20 years of experience delivering product engineering and consulting services to Fortune 500 companies. Leading automotive OEMs, Tier 1 suppliers, and transportation and mobility service providers, including HERE Technologies, Elmos, NNG, DKV, and Rand McNally, rely on Intellias to co-create custom solutions and digitally transform their businesses.   

Intellias helps partners and clients navigate in the ever-changing mobility landscape with our deep expertise in connectivity, autonomous driving, infotainment systems, eMobility, transport operations, and intelligent fleet analytics. We empower future mobility gathering under one umbrella with decades of experience delivering automotive and transportation solutions compliant with NDS, ASPICE, and TISAX. Intellias contributes to establishing the highest industry standards by collaborating with COVESA, Renesas, and AUTOSAR.

Why did you join COVESA and how long has your company been a member?

Intellias joined COVESA in September 2022. We understand that industry challenges cannot be tackled by any single company alone. Embracing an open-source approach, Intellias acknowledges the potential of open-source projects in addressing these challenges collectively.

Joining COVESA offers an avenue to connect and collaborate with like-minded individuals and organizations that provides valuable learning opportunities and insights into this rapidly evolving field.

Furthermore, Intellias recognizes the crucial role of standardization in the SDVs, as it helps streamline operations, enhance interoperability, and ensure a cohesive ecosystem.

What benefits does your participation in COVESA bring to your company and business? 

As an active participant in COVESA, Intellias is dedicated to advancing its competencies through close collaboration with key players in the automotive industry and experts in open-source development. This strategic partnership allows Intellias to gain a comprehensive understanding of the latest technological innovations required by automotive and mobility companies. By joining COVESA, Intellias has joined forces with an esteemed community of industry leaders, including BMW Group, Bosch, Ford Motor Company, LG Electronics, Renault Group, and NVIDIA.

Intellias aims to leverage its extensive experience of over 20 years in delivering software-defined solutions for the automotive sector. By sharing this expertise, Intellias aims to drive tangible business value for both COVESA members and its own clients. Intellias actively seeks engagement in a diverse range of technology-driven projects within the COVESA community, such as electric vehicle (EV) charging initiatives, proof-of-concept (PoC) development, and collaborative knowledge-sharing events.

Which COVESA collaborative project(s) or Birds of a Feather (BoF) is your company engaged in and why is that beneficial to your business?

Projects that we see a big interest in:

• VSS project. We see the need for standardization of vehicle data to be able to use it efficiently across industries and ease integration and accelerate the development of new services.
• Android Automotive. It’s one of our main areas of expertise, which is essential for our portfolio.
• EV Charging Event Data Aggregation Project. This project holds great importance from the perspective of electric vehicles (EVs), EV charging, and EV infrastructure.
• EV Optimization - Increasing Travel Range for Fixed Battery. We recognize the importance of energy consumption optimization in electric vehicles and aim to leverage vehicle data for optimizing energy usage of vehicle systems like Infotainment.
• Vehicle API.

BoF:

• Commercial Vehicle BoF (FleetOps)
• Android Automotive White Label App Store

Organizations interested in joining COVESA can visit covesa.global/join and information about technical participation in COVESA projects can be found on the COVESA Wiki.

By RemotiveLabs

Developing With Drive Playback

Volvo Cars is finding new ways to enable AAOS development in the automotive industry using standardized ways to communicate vehicle signal data (according to COVESA’s Vehicle Signal Specification VSS) with modern and collaborative tooling i.e., RemotiveLabs.

Developing apps and infotainment content in the automotive industry is cumbersome. The traditional tooling available is not sufficient to simulate multiple car data points. Volvo Cars developers are leading the way with new and flexible means of using vehicle signal data where third-party app developers can access it. Simultaneously this means that developers at OEMs are able to take full ownership of the debugging process.

Recent demo at the COVESA All Members Meeting

Together with RemotiveLabs, Volvo Cars recently demonstrated how they use the RemotiveBroker to playback drive cycles that map OEM proprietary vehicle signals and convert them to standardized vehicle signals (VSS) in an open-source Android Automotive emulator. This solution is used to populate a prototype or Android VHAL with real data and share it with third-party developers.

Peter Winzell, Volvo Cars explains: “For prototyping new applications, the approach with RemotiveLabs helping us populate the Android API with standardized signal data is really helpful. The APIs Google produces don’t cover fully what we need. We always need to add sensor data for relevant prototyping and this is a quite easy way of doing it.”

Volvo Cars software developers Kristoffer Nilsson and Peter Winzell together with RemotiveLabs Emil Dautovic. Renjith Rajagopal, Volvo Cars, demoed the solution live at the recent COVESA All Members Meeting.

By providing third-party developers with the tools they need to create innovative automotive apps, Volvo Cars supports the developer community and creates new ways of working relevant for the automotive industry in general. Further the setup enables exploration of ‘Edge Device Computation’ use cases by leveraging pre-recorded drive vehicle data from RemotiveBroker. Kristoffer Nilsson, Volvo Cars: “By providing real vehicle data from pre-recorded drive cycles using RemotiveLabs to AOSP (Android Open Source Project) through the Vehicle HAL, we open up the possibilities to create powerful open source emulators and tools to attract the developer community and make the development of automotive applications more available”.

The importance of automotive collaboration

RemotiveLabs recently joined COVESA due to the collaborative possibilities that their initiatives including VSS helps to enable between OEMs and third-party developers. You can test in the RemotiveLabs demo how to convert OEM data to VSS format – try it yourself at RemotiveLabs demo. Initiatives under the COVESA umbrella will have a large impact on automotive software development going forward and OEMs engagement and collaboration will be key for the success. Two additional such initiatives are the AOSP app framework standardization and VISS (the Vehicle Information Service Specification hosted by W3C) where the RemotiveLabs platform could serve as a vehicle data provider.

Thanks to the coordination of the technical leadership and a great turnout for the technical programs, there was significant engagement and progress made at the recent COVESA All Member Meeting in Porto, Portugal.

Vehicle Signal Specification currently has a significant buzz in the industry and there are multiple perspectives as to where it fits and how to use it. Hence, there is a common theme and push of making VSS real, practical and useable. Many of the sessions and workshops held in Porto aligned with moving this forward.

• Data Centric Architectures – Christian Muhlbauer, BMW and Stephen Lawrence, Renesas
• VSS Deployment Scenarios – Erik Jaegervall, Bosch
• Grounding Ontologies and Modeling in the Practical – Daniel Alverez-Coello, BMW
• Using VSS to Interact with AUTOSAR Systems (VSS Vehicle API) – Erik Jaegervall Bosch
• Developing with Drive Playback – Emil Dautovic, RemotiveLabs, Peter Winzell, Volvo, Renjith Rajagopal, Volvo, Kristoffer Nilsson, Volvo
• Architecture and Deployment Scenarios of the VISSv2 Interface – Ulf Bjorkengren, Ford
• Building Bridges with a common Data Middleware: How to enable Data Sharing and Collaboration across different Domains – Christian Muhlbauer, BMW, and Stephen Lawrence, Renesas

VSS 4.0 will be released soon.  We are currently in pre-release status. Our goal moving forward, is to align releases with All Member Meetings.

EV Charging Event Data Aggregation Project, led by Matus Banyay, Ford, Karsten Krabel, Ford, and Achim Henkel, Bosch, continued to align with VSS the data required to support better EV charging experiences. 

EV Power Optimization Project, led by Pradeep Kumar, Mobis, and Chandra Chitikela, Mobis, continued to align with VSS the data required for optimizing battery usage when needed.

A new Commercial Vehicle Birds of a Feather group was proposed by Ted Guild, Geotab and Thomas Spreckley, ETAS after:

• a presentation of FleetOps – Making VSS Practical by Ted Guild, Geotab, and Lowry Snow, AWS
• a demo of FMS + VSS Demo – Sven Erik, ETAS, and Thomas Spreckley, ETAS

As mentioned in Steve Crumb’s recent blog post, there was a proposal for App Framework Standardization by Melina Mascolo, BMW and Camille Ghibaudo, FORVIA that had significant interest from many OEMs, Tier 1s, technology and platform companies.

Alternate ways of accessing vehicle from Android are still very much in mix as well with Android API:  Closing the Gap – Jan Kubovy, BMW.

These are just a few of the AMM technical highlights, but you can find even more sessions and workshops here.

Please engage and get involved and to learn more about what is happening in COVESA, check out our wiki.

COVESA enjoyed another All Member Meeting in the beautiful city of Porto, Portugal, with just over 200 people in attendance. A big "thank you" goes out to our event sponsors and showcase participants shown in the graphic below. Sessions, slides and many videos from the three-day program are found here.

The first half-day of the program focused on introductory sessions to Vehicle Signal Specification and How to engage in COVESA expert groups and projects. Unlike previous AMMs, a three-session focus on vehicle App Stores closed the day with a market view, an appeal for a new COVESA group and then a working session to advance a Charter document for that group.

Wednesday was the busiest day with multiple tracks ranging from a business-level track, to a series of meetings to advance the work of the Data Expert Group.  Matt Jones and Shareef Hakim from Ford tag-teamed on sharing what OEMs are looking for in the future of connected vehicles, followed by a presentation by Gerald Spreitz from Bosch on Vehicles in a Digital Ecosystem. Next up on the business track was an excellent presentation by Maitê Alves Bezerra from Informa Tech Automotive Group on Understanding the Software Defined Future.  Also new to this AMM was the presentation and panel led by Magnus Liljeqvist of Volvo Trucks on Fleet Operations and the value of open collaboration to advance that sector. The remainder of the business track addressed subjects like sustainable software architectures (Aptiv), services as software-enabled revenues (Informa-led panel), the future of in-vehicle experiences (Stellantis) and the legal framework needed for software defined vehicles (RTI). Slides and videos of these sessions can also be found on the event page.

Another highlight on Wednesday was the story telling of two Ford employees that drove from Cologne Germany to Porto in an electric vehicle, and the charging anxieties and victories along the way. Wednesday closed with a member showcase and reception during which several organizations presented their products and services and several vehicles were displayed.

COVESA Community Director Paul Boyes will post a separate blog regarding the highlights of the technical programs, including other new projects (besides the App Store) under discussion within COVESA.

COVESA is finalizing plans for its fall 2023 member meeting, likely to be in the Detroit-area on 10-12 October. Sponsorship opportunities and showcase tables are available and can be secured by contacting Mike Nunnery (mikenunnery@comcast.net).  We look forward to another great event in the fall and hope to see you there.

And another special thanks to our AMM event and showcase sponsors: 

With Pedro Lopez Estepa, Director of Automotive, RTI

What does your company do? What services, or products, do you provide?

Real-Time Innovations (RTI) is the largest software framework company for autonomous systems. RTI Connext® software is the world's leading architecture for developing intelligent distributed systems from autonomous vehicles to medical robotics to unmanned aerial vehicles to sophisticated defense systems. Headquartered in Silicon Valley, RTI is the leading vendor of products compliant with the OMG® Data Distribution Service (DDS™) standard.

RTI Connext Drive® is the automotive-grade connectivity software framework that delivers the automotive software components, development tools and runtime applications to accelerate the development and deployment of autonomous vehicles, including ISO 26262 safety and ISO 21434 cybersecurity designs. It accelerates direct integrations into AUTOSAR Classic and ROS 2 which minimizes overall system complexity and cost, while providing scalability and flexibility to build a future-proof, evolving system that doesn’t compromise performance.

Connext Drive is certified to ISO 26262 ASIL-D, offering an accelerated path to building safety-critical systems for electric and autonomous vehicles.

Why did you join COVESA and how long has your company been a member?

RTI joined COVESA in late 2022. We joined at the request of several COVESA members, who requested our help as the organization explored the role of DDS in its current recommendations on communications interoperability and standards (specifically VSS and the cooperation with AUTOSAR). Over the past few years, OEM interest in DDS has risen sharply. As the global leader in DDS technology for automotive (and other industries), RTI engineers are experienced at integrating DDS with other standards such as SOME/IP, FRANCA IDL and AUTOSAR data serialization.  So we’re here to help, and to listen, learn and actively participate in the work of this consortium.  

What benefits does your participation in COVESA bring to your company and business?

COVESA is a thriving community that is working towards open, collaborative and impactful technology for connected vehicles. Like COVESA, RTI too is at the forefront of technology innovations that will enable the next generation of automotives.  In particular, we are interested in next-generation communications. The new software architectures provide major benefits to enable key functionalities, but if it goes in the wrong direction, it could result in large increases to the cost of integration. It’s therefore critical for auto companies to have access to a common architecture with standard communication models that can be shared across platforms and suppliers, in order to accelerate the development and cost optimization for the complete supply chain. VSS aims to solve this problem, and its impact will go beyond development. For organizations such as RTI, this will bring the focus on enhancing functionalities and not contextualizing on custom vehicle signal specifications. 

Which COVESA collaborative project(s) or Birds of a Feather (BoF) is your company engaged in and why is that beneficial to your business?

As a leader in DDS technology, RTI is interested in participating in the Vehicle Signal Specification (VSS), which defines a common approach for describing vehicle data. We believe that DDS could enhance the performance of the widely-adopted VSS data model, and we’re here to help with some of the integration modeling work to make this happen. In addition, RTI plans to be a key contributor on the interoperability tasks with AUTOSAR. RTI has been a key member in AUTOSAR, defining the integration of DDS in both Autosar Adaptive and Classic.

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!

COVESA wrapped up its fall All Member Meeting in late October with close to 250 in attendance and close to fifty speakers on the program. A big "thank you" goes out to our event sponsors and showcase participants shown in the graphic below.

The first half-day of the program focused on introductory sessions to Vehicle Signal Specification, Vehicle Service Catalog, and how to engage in COVESA expert groups and projects. The day closed with panels and presentations on Data Privacy and In-Vehicle experiences. While not all sessions used slides, the program and many session slides can be found here.

Wednesday was the busiest day with multiple tracks ranging from a business-level track, to a series of meetings of the newly formed Data Expert Group.  Lisa Drake from Ford shared a compelling vision of Ford's future of EVs, followed by a moderated panel of Ford and Stellantis representatives discussing emerging industry opportunities for OEMs. Next up on the business track was a cloud presentation by Alex Oyler from SBD Automotive followed by panels representing Tier 1, Silicon vendor, and Cloud vendor perspectives, as well as perspectives from organizations defining and delivering data-enabled services to the industry. Hyundai Motor presented a case study on their vehicle data architecture and AWS presented how they were using VSS in the context of their Fleetwise product.  The day was bookended with an equally compelling perspective from Visnu Sundaram on Stellantis' view of the future of in-vehicle experiences.

Another highlight on Wednesday was a Talking the Drive podcast recorded live at the AMM. In this episode, People-driven Marketing in the Car, host John MacLeod sat down with CEO of Drive Time Metrics, Rod MacKenzie, and Rivet Chief Engineer, Roy Casino for a great discussion about what marketers want, what’s missing and who can step up to revolutionize programming and marketing in the future car. You can listen to the recorded podcast here.

Wednesday evening was highlighted by a bustling and active showcase and reception during which more than 20 organizations presented their products and services. The Ford F150 Lightning on the floor instantly became the most expensive backdrop for selfies and group photos during the event.

Thursday kicked off with a view from academia with a presentation on the NSF-funded PIVOT project as well as additional working sessions by the Data Expert Group. Next up were working sessions of the EV Charging Event Data Aggregation project and a "pot-pourri" of talks by COVESA members on topics ranging from safe road infrastructure, to evolving UX insights, to the value of vehicle content to behavior AI in connected vehicles.

The event marked a second and definitive return to in-person events for COVESA. It was an invigorating event with an abundance of program content, new faces and great networking opportunities for all.

COVESA is in the planning stages of determining its Spring 2023 location, while actively planning for its CES 2023 showcase and reception in January (use passcode "collaboration" to gain access to site). Early indications show that the CES event will likely be as large and as well-attended as pre-COVID events. Sponsorship opportunities and showcase tables are still available by contacting Mike Nunnery (mikenunnery@comcast.net). We can't wait to see you either at our CES event or during the Spring AMM. 

And another special thanks to our AMM event and showcase sponsors: 

Leading Automotive SW Organizations Announce Collaboration on SDV Topics

The automotive industry is undergoing a major transformation towards the software-defined vehicle (SDV) whereby cloud and interface technologies play an important role. Given the variety of technologies and topics required to realize the software-defined vehicle, several collaborating organizations are positioning themselves to contribute to the software-defined vehicle, and these contributions must be coordinated.

With this coordination in mind, COVESA and AUTOSAR will leverage their respective strengths to align on a common collaboration towards several software-defined vehicle topics. COVESA will focus on vehicle data and services as well as cloud interaction while AUTOSAR will offer an open interface for the overall system architecture and the in-vehicle network. The collaboration will start with a vehicle API concept being discussed by both organizations. 

This approach emphasizes an exchange of vehicle data, described by COVESA’s Vehicle Signal Specification, between the cloud and AUTOSAR’s platforms for in-vehicle communication.  A joint proof of concept demonstration will show a seamless integration of communication, exchange of data and access of services between cloud and in-vehicle ECUs. In its initial phase the collaboration will focus on passenger cars, two-wheelers and commercial vehicles with an optional extension to other land-based transportation applications. As vehicle data and services become increasingly relevant to functional safety and cybersecurity, the collaboration will consider appropriate enhancements to vehicle data and services, including real-time behavior.

COVESA and AUTOSAR plan to extend the collaboration to other organizations contributing to the software-defined vehicle area.

Please visit the COVESA and AUTOSAR websites for more information on both organizations.