Bosch has been actively contributing software to the Vehicle Signal Specification (VSS) as part of the joint GENIVI/W3C Common Vehicle Interface Initiative (CVII) since mid-2020. VSS is a common vocabulary to describe vehicle signals, ensuring that the name and semantics of standard data points are the same across the software stack. We have joined to support the CVII’s objective of establishing industry-wide common interfaces for vehicle data and functions.
The automotive industry’s transformation and software’s key role in future generations of vehicles are prompting a paradigm shift in the school of thought on the conventions of automotive development. Three weeks ago, Bosch announced the software-defined car initiative towards a seamless integration between cars and clouds. This 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.
Ongoing discussions are giving rise to a growing industry consensus among OEMs and suppliers: Common shared data models and APIs with standard features will enable companies to compete by providing customer value in a cost-effective way. The development of an industry-wide technology stack to build interoperable solutions for vehicle data is imperative in times of a changing automotive industry and ever-evolving powerful cloud ecosystems.
Hence, activities such as the GENIVI/W3C CVII offer more and more opportunities to define vehicle-related technology. As a result, the industry can provide customers with well-aligned solutions based on open standards and avoid vendor lock-in. With the benefit of the underlying standardized interfaces to vehicles, the entire industry will find it easier to develop additional value-added services.
Bosch believes in the value of open standards and shared platforms. Not only is it working on the VSS and VSSo data models, Bosch has also open-sourced the Vehicle Edge and IoT Event Analytics platform as CVII projects under the terms of the Mozilla Public License 2.0. The IoT Event Analytics platform aggregates vehicle information and can process a stream of complex events in real time. The Vehicle Edge is a software stack that acts as an interface between vehicle-specific data sources and vehicle agnostic applications to (pre)process in-vehicle data in a decentralized way right at the source. To this end, the Vehicle Edge combines various legacy open source software projects such as Eclipse Kuksa.val and the newly contributed IoT Event Analytics platform. In this context, Bosch promotes the development of standardized interfaces to vehicles in close cooperation with GENIVI and W3C.
Bosch welcomes the CVII to establish a common, industry-wide vehicle data language and invites the open source community to use and further develop the Vehicle Edge and IoT Event Analytics projects. We look forward to sharing best practices across the industry, further fruitful discussions and software contributions.