This Seminar

Presenters: Amir Mohagheghzadeh (Combitech)

In this seminar, we will review activities done together with different managers at Volvo to highlight a roadmap for designing platform ecosystem for Trucks.

The process starts with defining trends and forces in the market and technology which is called discovery phase. Later we reviewed the values exchanged between different actors of the ecosystem. Based on that, we tried to foresee valuable services for this ecosystem. To enable service provides (including development teams at Volvo) we identified the resources (e.g. APIs) that should be provided by the platform.

The TrAF-Cloud project at a glance

Trucks today are already connected to the cloud, but functionality that utilizes cloud services are often isolated and implemented ad-hoc. Future trucks are expected to integrate seamlessly with off-board functionality to truly become an integral part of the larger traffic system—not only to enable shorter software update loops to respond to new environmental circumstances, but also to allow seamless deployment of functionality on-board where latency is low, or off-board where unlimited computational power is available.

To meet these expectations, the TrAF-Cloud project explores how to harmonize on- and off-board architectural design principles—to safely and securely blur the border between embedded systems and cloud service.

Concretely, the TrAF-Cloud project focuses on the need to: fundamentally change the signal- and ECU-based onboard vehicle architecture; exploring approaches to bridge on- and off-board platforms for seamless deployment; identify on- and off-board abstraction layers, and; to define useful and flexible APIs to promote modularity and reduce the dependence on specific implementations.