Blog

For seven years, GENIVI (now COVESA) had a great run of member showcase events at the popular Consumer Electronics Show (CES) each January in Las Vegas.  At our last showcase in January 2019, just prior to the Corona Virus lockdown, we hosted a highly targeted, automotive audience of over 1500 attendees.  These attendees browsed over sixty tables with automotive products and services from big name tier 1 suppliers to small, innovative start-ups.  What a night!  The best place to be to meet, greet and do business with a global, automotive buyers and sellers network.  And way easier than navigating a crowded show floor at the convention center.

It is with great pleasure that COVESA announces the return to this exciting event on 5 January 2022 at the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas.  The COVESA team (same as GENIVI) is preparing to bring this event back...and we hope you can join if you are planning to attend CES 2022.  We have already begun our communication about the event, having just completed a similar reception during the Auto Tech Week in November near Detroit.  It felt SOOOOO good to be together again!  Sponsoring and showcasing companies were pleased with that event and many of already booked their tables for the CES event.

The event will be held on 5 January from 6:00-9:00 pm in the beautiful and spacious (22K square feet) Bellagio Ballroom of the Bellagio Hotel and Resort.  This event is not an official CES event (don't look for it on the CES agenda) and CES organizers have granted COVESA approval to continue our long history of excellent, off-hours event.  Attendees can expect a "who's who" of automotive and connected vehicle stakeholders as well as a growing list of sponsors and companies showcasing their latest products and services. 

If your company's products and services are in need of some greater visibility among a highly qualified, automotive and connected vehicle audience, then please consider reserving your space by contacting michael nunnery for more information and options.  If you are interested in browsing products and services from many high quality companies in a single place (with a cocktail in hand), then register today using the passcode "collaboration".  Note that COVESA insists that the attendees qualify as an automotive stakeholder, so pre-registration is required.   

In summary, we are thrilled to be back at CES 2022 and we hope you can attend our next in-person gathering.  If you have any questions about COVESA or the event, please contact Steve Crumb or Mike for more information.  See you in Vegas!

COVESA, formerly GENIVI Alliance, is excited to engage in its first in-person event in quite some time during the upcoming Automotive Tech Week, held near Detroit, Michigan on 16-18 November. 

COVESA is involved in a number of activities during this event, most notably the end of day reception and showcase on the 17th at Bar Louie, just a short drive from the venue.  COVESA members and attendees that pre-register for the this networking event are invited to join us from 5:00pm to 8:00pm along with our generous event sponsors (see below) for an evening of craft beer sampling, cocktails, appetizers, and networking.  With 400+ expected to be in attendance , this is a great opportunity to LEARN MORE about the COVESA community, NETWORK and DO BUSINESS.  To pre-register for this event, please visit https://covesa2021.eventbrite.com and use the passcode "collaboration".

Providing opportunities for our members to network and to engage in a vibrant buyers and sellers ecosystem is one of the primary value propositions of COVESA.  As we emerge (safely) from a COVID-dominated past year, COVESA looks forward to bringing its members and the broader connected vehicle industry together to meet, greet and plan the future of mobility together.

If you have any questions about the COVESA networking event or desire to explore sponsorship, please contact Mike Nunnery, COVESA Marketing Manager, at MikeNunnery@comcast.net.  Please also visit the COVESA website to learn more about the organization.

We have some exciting news to share -- today we announced the rebrand of GENIVI Alliance and we are now the Connected Vehicle Systems Alliance (COVESA).  The new brand signifies the Alliance’s evolving technical focus to connected vehicle systems including in-vehicle, on-edge and in-cloud services, interfaces and data exchange. COVESA is the only alliance focused solely on developing open standards and technologies for connected vehicles, and our new brand and vision reflects the commitment and shared goal of creating a more diverse, sustainable and integrated mobility ecosystem.

Discover more about COVESA, and how we are accelerating the future of connected vehicles, in this short video.

COVESA will expand upon GENIVI’s strong foundation of active technology projects as well as its vehicle signal specification and work on vehicle to cloud connected services. COVESA encourages current and prospective new members to introduce new projects that deliver specifications, open source licensed software and related materials that equip the industry with useful assets for commercial solution development. More information on COVESA projects can be found on the COVESA Wiki. 

Please see the full press release and visit our new website at covesa.global. Also, please take a moment to read what some of our members are saying about COVESA and their enthusiastic support for accelerating the future of connected vehicles. COVESA member quotes can be found here.

GENIVI will be gathering again on 5-8 October for its next event that is open to both members and non-members.  This event will perhaps be one of the more important events in the 12-year history of GENIVI as several projects to evolve the purpose, scope and even brand of the organization will be unveiled.  GENIVI Members can expect an early "reveal" webinar in late September so stay tuned for an email invite.

The theme of the meeting is accelerating the potential of connected vehicles.  As with last Spring's event, the program will emphasize the how connected vehicles and the data they generate impacts services delivered by the automotive industry as well as adjacent industries.  Participants can expect content on core projects like Android Automotive, Common Vehicle Interface Initiative (CVII) as well in-vehicle payments, dynamic insurance applications leveraging vehicle data, and cybersecurity considerations.  If you have an interest in being considered as a speaker during this program, please contact Steve Crumb.

The GENIVI Board of Directors is still considering whether small face-to-face, regional gatherings in Munich and in Detroit-area are possible and prudent given the impact of the latest delta variant of COVID.  This decision will be finalized in mid-August, leveraging the latest information from relevant agencies to ensure the health of all participants is the top priority.  Either way, the event will use a new virtual platform called ExVo by AllSeated.  The platform has a very immersive experience that makes participation in program content and in networking much more intuitive and enjoyable.  GENIVI is able to offer 20 virtual booths for organizations interested in presenting product/service information to event participants.  ExVo feels much more like a virtual showcase experience allowing participants to "browse" content available at the booth, to request additional information with a simple click as well as engage in direct conversation with a company representative.  If you are interested in more information on sponsorship or reserving a booth, please contact  michael nunnery or Karin Hanson .

As with previous events, the program timing will align to afternoon Central Europe Time and early morning for most US time zones.  Content will be streamed live and also captured for on-demand playback by all including Asia-based audiences.

Program content will be published iteratively with a full program available in early September.  If you have any questions about the event, please contact Steve Crumb.  Please put a "save the date" in your calendars today for this important event and stay tuned for more information on the program in late August.

It was over a year ago that the first version of the Automotive Virtual Platform Specification (AVPS) was released, and during the pandemic year the AVPS has made slow but steady progress, leading to a new release.

The contributors to this specification are now proud to present version 2.0. This version carries significant updates in many critical chapters including Graphics, IOMMU, cryptography features, and introduces some new device areas as well.

The AVPS v2.0 is around 50 pages long and keeps its original style of including both a Discussion section and a formal Requirements section for each topic:

The discussion sections make up the bulk of the text so that the requirements can be succinct. Because of the complexity of the subject matter and the fast moving state-of-the-art, the discussion sections provide an overview of the current situation and important context for the requirements. This is not so common for requirement specifications, but seems very useful in this case. That introduction to each topic clarifies the rationale for the requirements and can also be a starting point for any discussions among buyers/users and providers/sellers of virtualization technology.  The requirement section is the normative part and the document includes a specific chapter about what it means to follow / be compliant with, the specification. Regarding the content, the overwhelming industry standard for kernel-to-hypervisor APIs (virtual device APIs) is VIRTIO. For that reason the AVPS requires the use of VIRTIO in many areas, by referring to specific parts of the VIRTIO specification rather than repeating or rewriting those requirements.

AVPS serves a purpose in addition to the existing VIRTIO specification document as follows:

• AVPS selects and specifies which parts of the full VIRTIO specification (some of which is applicable to servers and desktops) are applicable in an automotive environment.  We think it is important that the automotive industry takes charge of its own destiny when it comes to virtualization technologies, and define what it means to have an automotive virtual platform.
• In addition to virtual device APIs that are covered by VIRTIO, AVPS adds platform requirements outside of the device API.  As an example, the boot-protocol defines how operating systems in Virtual Machines (VM) are booted on a virtual platform and is very important for VM portability across implementations. The AVPS is similarly a place where other automotive-specific requirements can be collected, including non-functional requirements (such as performance or other characteristics).
• For features that do not fit into the VIRTIO specification or are not planned to be covered, the AVPS is a place to define another solution and for areas that are not yet completed in VIRTIO, an alternative stopgap solution could be written. In some cases the AVPS is already requiring VIRTIO-related proposals that have been generally agreed, but not yet released into a versioned VIRTIO document.
• Finally, in certain specific areas, automotive products might not be able to avoid specific solutions, such as hardware-specific support.  In certain cases, the only reasonable choice is one that might not match any proposed generic abstraction API.  Graphics is currently one such example where using hardware-assisted features is desired and unavoidable. To be truly useful, and not simply circumvented, an industry-specific requirement specification like AVPS must take into account the design choices that are most likely in automotive products.  This means writing reasonable, tailored requirements. In certain selected areas these may include compromises to better reflect the reality of the industry.

The team is proud of the achievement of getting version 2.0 out the door, and it is time to again spread the word of its existence and welcome further additional community input!   The AVPS document has an open-source (Creative Commons) license which is a guarantee for your time investment.

In combination with VIRTIO, the automotive industry industry now has a strong starting point for a shared virtualization standard, and additional input can increase its scope and quality even further.   Join the work to improve this important area of automotive technology!

      – Gunnar Andersson - Technical Lead, GENIVI Alliance

On 1 July starting at 1600 CEST, GENIVI, W3C and interested contributors will gather for our next, extended working session on Common Vehicle Interface Initiative (CVII) topics.  As you can see in the agenda below, the topics will include a broad range of existing and new topics.  We want to thank those who completed the pre-workshop survey and the working session will kick-off with the important findings of that survey.

The Agenda for the working session is as follows:

• Welcome and Agenda Review
• CVII Survey questions and results
  • Tailoring CVII priorities to industry needs
• Vehicle Service Catalog, and the potential of an industry-common Service Interface Description Language:
  • Including a proposal for VSC language, Franca IDL, OpenAPI, AsyncAPI and other options
• Alignment:  ISO Extended Vehicle specification – status and future discussion
  • Learn what the ISO ExVe specification contains and does not, outlook for the future and a discussion of data standardization   

B R E A K (at approximately 17.30)

•  Connecting to and with AUTOSAR
  • Discuss opportunities and plans for connecting data and service models used in-vehicle and outside
• AOS – A new cloud-and-vehicle framework  
  • Another example of CVII-compatible full-stack development with potential for collaboration
• Building the full “CVII technology stack”
  • Plans and open discussion

Webex details can be found on the CVII Wiki page.  If you have questions, please contact Philippe Robin,  Gunnar Andersson or Ted Guild.

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).