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As a follow-up to the productive collaboration experienced during the Common Vehicle Interface Initiative (CVII) workshops held at our all member meeting last May, GENIVI and W3C are planning a 3-hour follow-up working session to advance the active projects of the initiative.  In advance of the working session, attendees of previous workshops, webinars and other CVII-gatherings have been requested to complete a survey to bring the projects to more rapid decision points for current and future work based on the information gleaned from the survey.  Working session organizers are measuring perspectives in a variety of areas, some of which include:

• Viability of GENIVI and W3C producing standards in the areas envisioned in CVII
• Alignment to other organizations vital to reaching CVII goals
• Participant's interest in contributing to a variety of topics of focus in CVII
• Relative importance of in-vehicle, vehicle-edge and in-cloud standardization and collaborative development
• Greatest benefit to the industry of reaching the goals of CVII.

If you have an interest and some degree of understanding of CVII, we welcome you to complete the survey prior to 22 June, to give the session organizers time to process the data prior to the working session.  

The final agenda will be published late in the week of 21 June, but expect some of the topics to focus on advancing the Vehicle Signal Specification (VSS), continued discussion a an approach for a standard Vehicle Service Catalog (VSC), status of alignment to related collaborative organizations and building a supporting technology stack to support data exchange and management.  The details for attending the extended working session can be found on the CVII Wiki landing page.  If you wish to present or participate in this working session, please contact Philippe Robin or Gunnar Andersson.

As was discussed during the early May all member meeting, GENIVI and the Open Insurance Network (OPIN) have agreed to collaborate on a combined data standard that incorporates both vehicle and insurance data.  This collaboration kicked-off on 26 May with a discussion of three areas of work: technical analysis, business analysis and data privacy and compliance. 

During the technical analysis, the joint teams will compare their respective standard data models (including VSS), identify overlaps, and produce an aligned view representing both vehicle and insurance-related data.  The teams will also document impacts of an aligned data model to current and future interface definitions.  During the business analysis, the team will focus on producing end-to-end use case scenarios that combine vehicle and insurance data to validate the combined data model.  These scenarios will have both real-time and event-related orientations that will impact insurance modeling, pricing and underwriting.  And last but not least, the teams will explore issues of data privacy, security and compliance with regional and national regulations on data ownership and management.

The collaboration is settling into a regular, every other week cadence of meetings and welcomes active participation from others interested in the intersection of vehicle and motor insurance.  For more information about this activity, please contact Steve Crumb.

Thanks to authors at Geotab, GENIVI has a new tech brief available called Curve Logging.  This tech brief describes an approach for combining vehicle data sampling with edge processing to give the most accurate representation of a full data set within an allowable margin of error.  With the growing amount of data generated by today's vehicles, logic is needed to balance accurate data with reduced costs for vehicle to cloud communication.  Fleet management companies and a growing number of entities consuming passenger vehicle data need to strike this balance of efficiency and accuracy.

The tech brief describes Geotab's Curve Logging algorithm and also provides a link to the Geotab github repository in which the algorithm is further discussed and the library is made available under the MPL v. 2.0 license.  Note also that a document listing associated patents can also be accessed from the repository.

GENIVI is grateful to Geotab for this informative publication and invites all interested parties to read the document and to visit the repository.

On 22 April, GENIVI and eSync Alliance announced a new collaboration to simplify data gathering and management based on existing technologies delivered by the respective organizations.  The press release was the result of a joint liaison agreement that enables the organizations to discuss how the data gathering portion of eSync's specification might apply in the Common Vehicle Interface Initiative (CVII) that GENIVI and W3C have introduced during the last year.  

Part of the CVII work involves the industry engaging around a standard vehicle data model and GENIVI has put forth its Vehicle Signal Specification (VSS) as a candidate.  As part of the collaboration between GENIVI and eSync Alliance, the organizations will explore the relationship between VSS and the eSync Alliance approach for moving data to and from the vehicle.  Further, the GENIVI Cloud and Connected Services Project (CCS) has developed a reference architecture for vehicle to cloud connectivity and the "data pipe" technology described in eSync Alliance's documents may allow for a more rapid and standards-based approach for building out portions of that reference architecture.  Additionally, eSync Alliance's specification defining a standard for Software over the Air (SOTA) will also be considered for inclusion in the standard vehicle service catalog (VSC) that is being developed as part of CVII.

The relationship established between GENIVI and eSync Alliance is one instance of the alignment activities required to make CVII successful.  The initiative brings together existing and new standards and solutions to produce approaches that reduce complexity in future vehicle software and data management systems.  

The new relationship will be further discussed during an upcoming virtual panel session entitled, "The Value of Standardization in Automotive Over-the-Air Updating and Data Gathering", being held on 27 April at 10:00 US EDT / 1600 CEST.  Roger Lanctot and Greg Basich from Strategy Analytics will moderate the panel that includes the following panelists:

• Mark Singer – Chair, Marketing Work Group of the eSync Alliance
• Martin Bornemann – Director Systems, Mobility Architecture Group, Aptiv
• Franck Lesbroussart – Director, Advanced Software Development, ZF Group; Member Board of Directors, eSync Alliance
• Jered Floyd - Technology Strategist, Office of the CTO, Red Hat
• Steve Crumb – Executive Director, GENIVI Alliance. 

The panel is free to all who register here. 

During its annual meeting in March, the GENIVI Board of Directors elected two new members, Geotab and Renesas. 

Geotab will be represented by Christoph Ludewig, VP OEM Europe, and Ulf Bjorkengren, Senior Connectivity Strategist.  Christoph recently joined Geotab after previous positions at Mercedes-Benz Connected Services and Daimler Fleet Management.  Christoph has also graciously agreed to keynote during the upcoming GENIVI All Member Meeting (4-7 May) so you will hear from him soon.  Ulf is a familiar contributor to GENIVI and W3C, having been instrumental in developing the Vehicle Interface Service Specification (VISS) and also contributing heavily to the Vehicle Signal Specification (VSS) or related open source projects in GitHub. 

Renesas will be represented by Hisao Munakata, Senior Director, and long time participant in GENIVI.  Munakata-san has consistently supported the usage of open software in Renesas' products and brings to GENIVI strong relationships with several open source stakeholders, alliances and Japan-based organizations.

The Board will welcome its new members during its upcoming meeting on 14 April.  

The Board also acknowledges the great work and leadership provided to GENIVI by the departing Board members, Tero Salminen (OpenSynergy) and Ari Aalto (TietoEvry).  We are very grateful for their insights over the years and look forward to their continued engagement in the alliance going forward.

The fundamental shift from a hardware-based to a software-centric IoT device on wheels requires a rethink to address customer needs. Today, customer value is driven by software features such as infotainment as well as driver assistance and intelligent connectivity features rather than by mechanical functions. This presents a towering challenge, as no company is going to be able to transform the automotive industry on its own. Companies have to collaborate within the automotive ecosystem and build synergies with partners. This is why we believe that open standards and open source, as a model for collaborative development, offer a faster path towards new and rapid innovations.

As part of the CVII, Bosch has contributed and is working on the Vehicle Edge and IoT Event Analytics open-source projects.

IoT Event Analytics is an efficient stream processing and complex event processing (CEP) engine based on a publish/subscribe system. It can run inside a vehicle to (pre)process data and in the backend. IoT Event Analytics platform already includes SDKs for Node.js, Python, and CPP to implement “talents” extend and use the platform. A Visual Studio Code plugin helps you to get productive fast.

The Vehicle Edge is a software stack for vehicle computers. It acts as a bridge to signals and services from field buses and other ECUs. The Vehicle Edge stack combines various software components and is built around the IoT Event Analytics platform. Vehicle signals are abstracted using the GENIVI VSS data model. These VSS signals are made available to vehicle-agnostic applications running in the IoT Event Analytics platform via the KUKSA.val server implementing the W3C VISS standard.

Bosch supports the GENIVI and CVII goal of establishing an industry-wide common vehicle data language and invites the open source community to use and further develop the Vehicle Edge and IoT Event Analytics. In the CVII we look forward to sharing best practices across the industry and to further fruitful discussions and software contributions.

Join the CVII by participating in any of the active subprojects.

For further information regarding the IoT Event Analytics or Vehicle Edge you can contact Lars-Erich-Kiefer, Christian Kerstan or Sebastian Schildt

In collaboration with Automotive World (Mobex),  GENIVI along with guest speakers Magnus Feuer (Automotive Software Architect and W3C Contributor) and Gunnar Andersson (Tech Lead at GENIVI Alliance) will discuss a new set of challenges facing the automotive industry as it starts its transition to Service Oriented Architectures.  You are invited to hear more during this free webinar that will be held on 6 April (4PM UK; 5PM CEST; 11AM US EDT).

Requirements will be extended with service specifications where interoperability and integration tests will be key vehicle program success factors.  GENIVI, W3C, and collaborating organizations meet these member challenges by building on the successful Vehicle Signal Specification project and creating the Common Vehicle Interface Initiative (CVII) to standardize both vehicle data and services model.

Using the Vehicle Service Catalog in CVII, vehicle programs can elevate the conversation between stakeholders from requirements to use cases and interaction flows between ECUs, cloud services, and mobile devices.  The risk of uncontrolled proliferation of overlapping service definitions can be turned into the strength of a well defined feature set with clear interface definitions described in an industry-wide, common manner.

Join this webinar where we show how the automotive industry can jointly build a strong set of services, signals, and models that will lay the groundwork for successful adoption of a Service Oriented Architecture.

Registration Link: https://mobex.io/webinars/soa-is-coming-to-your-vehicle-program-we-need-to-talk-about-standard-services/ 

Please place in your calendars 4-7 May 2021 as the dates for the upcoming GENIVI Virtual All Member Meeting.  It is our sincere hope that this will be our final ALL virtual AMM and we hope for some face-to-face opportunities later in the year.  

In May, we will continue to emphasize the Common Vehicle Interface Initiative (CVII) activities and use the first two days to emphasize the potential business value that CVII deliverables offers our members and the industry broadly.  You may have heard much about vehicle data monetization, but vehicle data, when coupled with vehicle service definitions, can produce great business value to OEMs and their suppliers, even before third-party applications are considered.  During our typical "trends and business value" track, occurring on the 4th and 5th, we will explore some "alternative" approaches to gaining value from standard vehicle data and services.

We will also hold working sessions for the four current tracks of activities under the CVII project, including vehicle data models, vehicle service catalogs, technology stack (tooling) and alignment to other organizations.  In addition to the CVII tracks, we will hold another workshop on in-vehicle payments and a track on automotive cybersecurity.  These workshops and the previously mentioned trends and business track will be open to GENIVI members and guests.

Finally, we believe it is time for an open discussion and dialog with our current GENIVI members.  2020 was a difficult year and the technical shift toward CVII and all things related to vehicle and cloud connectivity may have left some of our members questioning their role in the organization.  We want to have an open and honest dialog about this, including a panel of Board members available to share the rationale of the shift, to talk about the future and to answer questions from our members.  This members-only discussion will be identified as a separate session from the main AMM schedule and we will make members aware of when to show up for this important dialog.

If you are interested in sponsoring the all member meeting, please reach out to Karin Hanson (karinha at khansonevents dot com).  While we will not have a virtual showcase this time, we will be exploring ways to support your commerce-related activities so please contact Mike Nunnery (mikenunnery at comcast dot net) for more information on options.

May is not far away so please reserve room in your calendars for this upcoming virtual all member meeting and we will get details about registration and the schedule posted as soon as possible. 

The GENIVI In-Vehicle Payment Special Interest Group (IVP-SIG) recently held a very successful and well attended workshop.  The workshop content directly focused on the intersection of in-vehicle technologies, payment technologies and EV-charging trends.

Thirty-four companies attended and heard content following three main themes: integrating the automotive and payment ecosystems, use cases related to EV-charging and trends in voice biometrics for commerce and authentication.  John Moon, GENIVI IVP-SIG Lead, opened the workshop with the purpose and goals for the GENIVI IVP-SIG as well as an overview of the IVP ecosystem.  Anthony Petit, Director of Internet of Things at Visa, continued the workshop with a presentation about the challenges and opportunities of more seamless integration of payments in the vehicle.  His presentation was followed by a Q&A session with Chris Budzynski, Director of Utility Policy at Exelon, who provided a view of the priorities facing an energy provider in the emerging EV world.  This was followed by a presentation by Boris Polania, Lead System Architect, e-Mobility Services at American Honda Motor Company, who spoke about "Takers and Givers", the use case of EV's not just consuming but providing power to the grid, and how that might affect payments.  Finally, Daniel Thornhill, SVP Global Pre-Sales for ValidSoft, presented the emergence of voice as both a means of executing commerce in the vehicle, as well as authenticating the purchaser by means of voice biometrics.

Slides for most of the presentations are available on the IVP SIG wiki page.  The IVP SIG is proceeding with additional activities including:

• May 4-7th 2021 - IVP & EV Charging panels and workshop discussions during the upcoming GENIVI Virtual AMM (All Member Meeting) 
• June 8-10th 2021 - GENIVI at TU Automotive FOCUS Vehicle Commerce Conference (GENIVI IVP-SIG participants receive a 25% discount for this event - Ask Mike for details).

Additionally, GENIVI IVP-SIG is cooperating with TU-Automotive on a survey on IVP technologies and approaches, in preparation for the June vehicle commerce conference.  You can participate in the survey here. 

If you have any questions or wish to participate in the IVP-SIG, please contact John Moon (jmoon at connectedtravel.com) or Mike Nunnery (MikeNunnery at comcast.net).

On 18 February, over sixty individual participants from nearly 40 unique organizations gathered for a several hour working session discussing the activities of the Common Vehicle Interface Initiative (CVII).  Co-hosted by GENIVI and W3C, the working session offered an informative and (intentionally) diverse set of presentations and dialogs.  The schedule, divided into three major components, can be found on the associated wiki page, on which you can also find slides for most of the presentations.

After brief introductions by Ted Guild, W3C Automotive Lead, and Gunnar Andersson, GENIVI Technical Lead, the first major component of the session included a series of updates from existing and related projects.  These updates represented work already active in GENIVI and W3C and enabled participants see that CVII is already a mature and productive project, one built on a strong foundation of previously delivered work that is further blossoming within the activities of CVII.  

The second major component of the working session was about alignment to existing work in other organizations like Sensoris, eSync Alliance, and the Open Insurance Network.  Because the scope of CVII encompasses the work of many other organizations, an active work thread of alignment to the work of others is essential.

A third and final major component of the working session was focused on the CVII Technology Stack activities.  Informative talks on developing a common Vehicle Service Catalog and Vehicle Signal Specification layering were given by experts.  BMW and Bosch took time to contextualize CVII into their own, data-oriented future.  And finally, discussion was held about CVII-related activities both in-vehicle and in the broader ecosystem of connectivity like Web of Things.

A general purpose and open email list (cvii-general@lists.genivi.org) for keeping people informed on CVII was announced during the workshop and any one interested can subscribe at lists.genivi.org.  For more information on CVII, please review the materials available on the CVII Home Page including a briefing document, an in-depth tutorial slide deck, and general information about upcoming events and meetings.  Contact information for both Ted and Gunnar can be found on the CVII Working Session wiki page. 

In addition to ongoing weekly meetings and webinars planned in coming weeks, CVII will be a major portion of the upcoming, GENIVI Virtual All Member Meeting, scheduled for 4-7 May 2021.  Stay tuned for more details about this important gathering of the GENIVI community and others interested in the work.

GENIVI and W3C have planned a joint work session on 18 February (1600-2000 CET / 10:00am-2:00pm US EST) as one of several next steps taken to activate the Common Vehicle Interface Initiative (CVII).  For several months now, GENIVI and W3C have been building awareness of the joint initiative with OEMs and the automotive industry broadly and the time has come to trigger additional productive collaboration around standard vehicle data models, vehicle/cloud interfaces and standard vehicle service definition and invocation.

Building on weekly meetings within the W3C Automotive Working Group as well as the GENIVI Cloud and Connected Services project, the upcoming working session will explore three key areas:

• Overview of Existing Projects
  • Vehicle Signal Specification (VSS) and Vehicle Signal Specification Ontology (VSSo)
  • GENIVI Cloud and Connected Services Project
  • Vehicle Service Catalog and protocols for remote invocation
  • CVII Technology Stack Definition
  • Android Automotive SIG - Vehicle Hardware Abstraction Layer (VHAL)
• Further discussion on CVII Technology Stack
• CVII Future Activities & Alignment to Other Bodies.

Participants will receive a status update on previous and current work encompassed in CVII and will also learn of practical ways of engaging in a number of active threads of the initiative.

The logistics for the working session can be found on the CVII pages of the GENIVI Wiki.  The detailed agenda of the working session will be posted to CVII wiki page in coming days.

GENIVI and W3C invite you to join this important initiative as it builds momentum toward a unified, industry-standard approach for vehicle data, vehicle services and vehicle-cloud interfaces. 

UPDATE:  Click here for the detailed agenda

Mobility Pioneer will be the mobility innovation focal point for 2021, setting the tone and providing the kickstart for what promises to be a fantastic year in transportation. Bringing together government, tech companies, startups, and investors, Mobility Pioneer will focus on the future and innovation in infrastructure, public transit, Transportation Systems Management and Operations (TSMO), fleet operations plus connected, autonomous, shared and electric vehicles.

Mobility Pioneer is an opportunity for technology companies to demonstrate their solutions to potential customers. A congress for public agencies to share with and learn from their peers. A forum for startups to promote their innovative technologies to potential investors. GENIVI Alliance members are invited to join us on Tuesday 9 February at 14:00 GMT. Register on Eventbrite (https://bit.ly/3ojwcNQ) using the free code: MP2021GENIVI 

For more information visit: https://www.mobilitypioneer.com/.

On Thursday, February 25th, 2021, from 10:00 am - 1:00 pm US Eastern Time, GENIVI will host a complimentary virtual (on-line) collaboration workshop event.

IVP COLLABORATION WORKSHOP AGENDA

The focus of the February 25th GENIVI IVP Collaboration Workshop consists of (3) areas of discussion/presentation including Payments, Authentication, and UX.

Below briefly defines the five goals of the GENIVI VIP Special Interest Group (SIG) who will be leading the IVP workshop discussions:

1)    Provide a foundation of knowledge and access to the established ecosystems of automotive, payments, and retail.

2)    Provide a forum for automotive, payments, and retail to understand and develop requirements to enable commerce in the vehicle in a convenient and safe manner.

3)    Define and establish potential projects that mutually benefit and advance the acceptance of in-vehicle payment applications.

4)    Identify and define projects that would advance the standardization of specifications and requirements for in-vehicle payments for all interested industries.

5)    Facilitate and provide a unified industry representation of automaker needs with payments regulatory bodies.

Attending this IVP collaboration workshop will be Automotive OEMs, Tier 1s, payment card brands, merchants, integrators, developers, and other key stakeholders.   

If you're interested in collaborating with other organizations and professionals from both the IVP and EV Charging ecosystem, this workshop is for you.

To register for the event please visit:   https://IVPworkshop.eventbrite.com   passcode is “collaboration”

If you have any questions regarding this no-cost event, please contact GENIVI's IVP lead John Moon (Connected Travel) at jmoon at connectedtravel dot com or Mike Nunnery (GENIVI's Marketing Manager) at mikenunnery at comcast dot net.

The Automotive Virtual Platform Specification (first published version here, and look here for the ongoing working draft) is a collaborative work with an open source license, intended to be the common specification for compatible implementations of virtualization platforms for automotive.

It promotes device virtualization standards like VIRTIO in order to require common APIs that Hypervisors should provide, and complements this by defining other aspects of a virtual platform that VIRTIO cannot cover by itself.  Those are things like boot protocol and other general platform requirements.  The project also analyzes how and when to use hardware-assisted virtualization support while balancing this with the portability goals, for example at which times other methods may supersede emulation and paravirtualization approaches.

Those who are working on this specification (JOIN US!) believe it can be a very useful and important basis the automotive industry and we tend to get the same positive feedback from OEMs, Hypervisor vendors and independent technologists (although with the concern that it is challenging to do).

It is a great, and achievable, goal but the specification doesn't write itself...

If you believe improving the state of virtualization in automotive is important, the team would like to invite you to join us in the new year.  Don't miss the chance to give your personal and your company's input on this important part of the automotive technology stack.  We CAN have better and clearer requirements, more portability, and less integration hassles for multiple operating systems and multiple hypervisor implementations, if we work together on automotive virtualization.

The meeting is held every Monday at 10.00 AM CET and the work is open to everyone, members and non-members alike, so just get involved. If the time slot does not suit you, let us know and we can renegotiate the meeting times with everyone who is interested.  You can find the invitation on the genivi-projects@lists.genivi.org mailing list (check the archives, and subscribe), or contact Gunnar Andersson, GENIVI Technical Lead directly (gandersson at genivi dot org).

Two talks proposed by GENIVI were accepted to the Embedded, Mobile and Automotive Devroom at FOSDEM (Free and Open-Source Developers European Meeting – virtual this year) scheduled on 6-7 February.  FOSDEM is the largest conference of its kind in the world, normally attracting more than 8000 participants and delivering more than 30 presentation tracks. GENIVI is pleased to have representatives from the Android Automotive SIG (AASIG) and the Cloud and Connected Services (CCS) project present during the event.  FOSDEM is open to the public and links to the presentations are provided below.

Networked Audio in Android Automotive

The first talk will be delivered by the GENIVI Android Automotive SIG Audio HAL project. Suhasini Raghuram from Analog Devices will present the outcome of the project work on Networked Audio in Android Automotive.

The modern vehicle audio system is built with a number of networked components that are required for many complex and integrated functionalities such as active noise cancellation, warning sounds, diagnostics, etc. And thus, complex and flexible audio setups are a fundamental design need for modern vehicles. GENIVI AASIG analyzed various scenarios of integrating Android in this complex setup and explored the maturity and gaps of Android Automotive solution in this context. This talk aims to highlight some of the findings of the team and discuss further topics for investigation in this area.

The AASIG Audio HAL talk is scheduled on Sunday 7 February 15:30-16:00 CET.

Link: https://fosdem.org/2021/schedule/room/dembedded/ 

Designing an open communication framework for the connected car

The second talk will be delivered by the GENIVI Cloud & Connected Services project (CCS). Kevin Valdek from High-Mobility and Ulf Bjorkengren from Geotab will present the outcome of the project work on an open communication framework for the connected car.

The connected car has been around for some time but we are still waiting for a large breakthrough when it comes to third party services powered by vehicle data. The fragmentation of different technical solutions makes it difficult for 3rd parties or developers to work with easily accessible vehicle APIs.

To tackle this, the GENIVI Cloud & Connected Services project is designing an end-to-end communication framework starting from the data transfer from embedded systems in the vehicles and spanning to cloud based APIs. The framework is built on open protocols and is demonstrated with open-source reference code with the aim of simplifying implementation work for both car manufacturers and 3rd party developers. The presentation will show a Proof-of-Concept implementation that the project has made available to anyone.

The CCS talk is scheduled on Sunday 7 February 16:00-16:30 CET.

Link: https://fosdem.org/2021/schedule/room/dembedded/