Adoption of Software-Defined Architecture in the Commercial Vehicle Industry

As the world becomes increasingly more digital and connected, trucks, buses, vans, and specialized vehicles are evolving into sophisticated software-defined machines. This change has shifted priorities to reshape fleet operations, enhance driver experiences, and redefine the nature of commercial mobility.

Compared to the passenger car industry, commercial vehicle Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) need to deal with strict emission regulations, growing requirements for greenhouse gas reductions and a shortage of truck drivers. This has led to the increased level of interest in trucks with enhanced software capabilities that help further improve efficiencies, safety, and productivity. The financial benefits of the shift from hardware-defined vehicles to software-defined vehicles (SDV) may be more significant for commercial vehicles than passenger cars due to positive impact from the level of modularity and upgradability.

This blog will explore SDV challenges, industry learnings, and proposed solution accelerators that the commercial vehicle industry can adopt and extend to fit their unique use cases.

Software-Defined Commercial Vehicles

SDVs play a crucial role in the advancement of new driving capabilities in the automotive industry. As has been detailed in previous AWS blogs, with the industry shift towards SDVs, manufacturers are looking to optimize Electric/Electronic (E/E) architecture and increase software reusability by reducing the number of Electronic Control Units (ECUs) in the vehicle, including zonal architectures and high performance compute ECUs. Along with ECU consolidation, commercial vehicle OEMs are using over-the-air update capabilities from SDV architecture that will allow truck manufacturers to further strengthen predictive and preventive maintenance helping enable early defect discovery leading to improvement in uptime. Increasing uptime is a key performance indicator in the trucking industry as it can directly impact the efficiency and profitability of the transportation business.

Commercial SDVs have some unique requirements beyond those of the passenger vehicle industry. Those differences include:

• Increased flexibility and modularity: In passenger vehicles, various trim levels and options are produced based on expected customer demand. For commercial vehicles, various vehicle configurations are made for specific business needs linked to a customer request. Customers may want engine performance and cabin configurations to be customizable via software updates. Fleet operators may want to tailor vehicles for specific tasks or routes without physical modification which can eliminate the need for purchasing specialized vehicles for different purposes. Specialized trailers that are climate-controlled need to meet specific customer requirements and industry standards.
• Enhanced Efficiency: Real-time monitoring and adjustment of vehicle parameters can help reduce fuel consumption and operational costs. System components such as hardware and software can be used across vehicle lines to help expedite and lower cost development. In addition, integration with fleet management systems can improve coordination and route optimization.
• Advanced upgradability: Customers may want commercial SDVs to be more future-proof, modular and scalable. Aftermarket and third-party devices and technological advancements are unique for this space. The ability to upgrade fleets over time for new capabilities, such as autonomous hub-to-hub transport, new telematics solutions, connectivity and integration of specialized trailers is key to unlocking long-term value for customers.
• Robust Maintainability: Minimizing downtime is critical for commercial operations. Enabling remote diagnostics and maintenance capabilities to identify issues early, pre-schedule service, and part ordering can help reduce repair costs and vehicle downtime. Commercial vehicles also face stringent regulations and need to quickly adapt to evolving emissions and privacy regulations. Robust cybersecurity measures must be implemented to protect vehicles and sensitive business data which is increasingly difficult in a world of aftermarket modifications.

By addressing these unique demands, software-defined commercial vehicles can provide significant value to fleet operators, logistics and supply chain companies, and last mile delivery units, helping enhance operational efficiency, reduce costs, and enable new business models in the transportation and logistics sectors. To meet these challenges, Cognizant and AWS have collaborated on SDV accelerators that can help commercial OEMs integrate their existing architecture while preparing for the future.

Cognizant and AWS SDV Accelerators

Cognizant is a premier AWS Partner Network (“APN”) Partner with the AWS Automotive Competency. As an APN Partner, Cognizant has developed solution accelerators for the SDV industry that provide pre-built architecture for more seamless implementation of cloud to edge virtual validation test orchestration and automation framework.

Cognizant and AWS SDV accelerators help commercial vehicle manufacturers improve their software development pipeline by providing developers a robust solution to create virtual hardware and software solutions independent of the target hardware.

Through various proofs of concept, Cognizant has demonstrated SDV capabilities to develop and validate digital cockpit features. Shown in figure 1 below, the SDV methodology combines AWS Graviton based Amazon EC2 instances as a development environment. Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) created with the open-source project SOAFEE framework and built using the Edge Workload Abstraction and Orchestration Layer serve as a reference embedded Linux platform. Combined with ARM based container build pipeline, docker networking, and docker command-line interface (Docker CLI) tools this provides developers a more robust, scalable, heterogeneous, and distributed compute architecture to develop and test their applications.

Figure 1. Cloud to Edge Environment Parity pipeline.

As shown in figure 1 above, we have demonstrated the environmental parity between the cloud and NXP i.MX8QuadMax hardware to build “in-vehicle infotainment” and “digital cluster” applications as containers with Ubuntu 20.04 that are developed using AWS tools.

This cloud native solution provides commercial vehicle manufacturers with the ability to develop features independent of the target hardware in a shorter period of time as supply chain and logistics may delay the overall development process. This allows the testing of various commercial vehicle modularity and configuration testing that is specific to customer needs given the outlined challenges above.

Automated Virtual Validation

In a collaborative effort to enhance the efficiency of the virtual validation process, Cognizant, working with a North American OEM, have implemented automation for the majority of steps involved in virtual validation. This unique strategic automation is designed to help expedite the validation process, and help enable a rapid response and quicker validation cycles whenever a new software version is released.

Commercial vehicle test cycles are complex, driven by federal regulations and safety requirements. Verification and validation of various configurations and specifications can be a time-consuming process involving expensive hardware in loop setup and research and development costs. To minimize this impact, the virtual Electronic Control Unit (vECU) automation process mentioned in figure 2 below, streamlines the virtual ECU creation process, helping significantly reduce manual effort and enhances accuracy, thereby providing more reliable and predictable test results as shown in Figure 2 below.

Figure 2. Automated VECU Creation process.

The process shown above is designed to automate the generation and construction of a vECU, using configurable options selected by the user. It helps streamline the entire process, managing necessary steps and settings that are essential for the creation of a vECU. The process starts with input of source code from software components (SWC) in the form of ARXML file format that gets imported in the ECU architecture, creates an ECU instance to generate the binaries for virtual ECU implementation.

Improve Uptime with Cognizant and AWS SDV accelerators

The integration of cloud-native development and DevOps pipeline with automated virtual validation helps enable seamless deployment of software updates via over the air (OTA). To help deploy these tools, commercial vehicle manufacturers can utilize a variety of technologies, cloud services, and deep automotive expertise from Cognizant and AWS. Customers using these technologies are able to start their development process earlier and run thousands of tests in parallel, as opposed to running a much smaller number of tests sequentially on a limited number of physical testbenches.

The Software-Defined Vehicle architecture helps improve uptime by giving customers the ability to schedule remote updates from within a vehicle, and helps provide more control to the driver and fleet manager. Additionally, some real-time parameter updates are becoming more dynamic, giving trucks the ability to adapt automatically to local conditions, improving safety and fuel efficiency.

Conclusion

In summary, the exploration of cloud native development and automated virtualization within the commercial vehicle industry has to the ability to redefine the future of transportation. The adoption of a Cognizant Solution accelerator built on AWS and the automated virtual ECU creation process helps facilitate a paradigm shift from traditional, linear development processes to a more dynamic, iterative approach. This shift not only aligns with the accelerating pace of automotive innovation but also with the industry’s drive towards increased agility and customer-centricity.

We introduced the concept to connect commercial vehicle software development with AWS Graviton-based Amazon EC2 instances to simulate state-of-the-art E/E architectures in a cloud environment. We outlined how the concept works by describing Cognizant Solution accelerators built on AWS. Lastly, we explained how automotive software developers and testers can benefit from the automated virtual validation process to perform verification and validation in a fully virtual and scalable environment independent of the hardware.

Cognizant provides a pre-built accelerator that can be seamlessly integrated to deliver immediate value in creating a virtual environment for development and validation while using native application code. This provides significant opportunities to help reduce costs, improve software quality, reduce defects and achieve faster time-to-market in an overall development process. If interested to learn more about how we can accelerate your SDV journey, please reach out.