Introducing AWS for Automotive – Accelerating digital transformation across the auto industry

Today at re:Invent 2021, Amazon Web Services (AWS) introduced AWS for Automotive, a new initiative that brings together new and existing in-vehicle, cloud, and cloud-to-vehicle services and solutions from AWS and its partners. AWS solutions and services are used by thousands of automotive manufacturers, mobility providers, suppliers, technology companies, and retailers globally. This new AWS for Automotive initiative simplifies cloud-based service and solution discovery in a single online resource making it easier to understand and deploy the best resource for a particular challenge. This allows customers to innovate faster with less investment risk. To learn more about AWS for Automotive, visit thinkwithwp.com/automotive/.

AWS for Automotive includes newly announced AWS IoT FleetWise. AWS IoT FleetWise makes it easier and more cost effective for automakers to collect, transform, and transfer vehicle data to the cloud in near-real time. With AWS IoT FleetWise, automotive companies can easily gather data from across their fleets, store it in the cloud, and start using it in a variety of ways—like remotely diagnosing issues in individual vehicles, analyzing fleet health to help minimize potential recalls or warranty claims, and using analytics and machine learning to improve autonomous driving and advanced driver assistance systems.

This new service is at the core of the auto industry’s drive to unlock the power of data and make better-informed decisions using machine learning. It’s is also now possible to use these insights to make improvements to the vehicle continuously via over-the-air updates. AWS and its partners are helping rearchitect vehicle software that is connected to the cloud so customers can better access, understand, use, and update data and vehicle features necessary for new mobility offerings and capabilities.

All of these innovations together allow automotive and mobility companies to create new recurring revenue streams to address uncertain sales volumes; disrupt retail to respond to new customer expectations and ownership models; and transform to software-defined, electrified, autonomous vehicles that meet regulatory and consumer expectations. This is all while navigating more complex global supply chains, and mitigating increased manufacturing costs that continue to erode margins.

The success of every automaker, supplier, and mobility provider is contingent on how well they navigate this transition from manufacturer to technology company. AWS for Automotive helps customers navigate this historic transformation with the talent, technology, and experience necessary to digitally transform every area of the automotive business.

AWS for Automotive helps companies design services fast; collect, store, and use huge amounts of data; and develop new features and safety improvements as cost effectively and with the least amount of up-front investment possible. It does this by curating purpose-built services and solutions from both AWS and its partner network across seven specific solution areas: Software-Defined Vehicle, Connected Mobility, Autonomous Mobility, Digital Customer Engagement, Product Engineering, Manufacturing, and Supply Chain.

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AWS delivers its solutions and services in four ways, depending on customer need:

1. Purpose-built services and solutions: Allows customers to focus on the differentiated components of their business and not on the undifferentiated development.
2. Co-development efforts: AWS invests time and resources to co-develop solutions with customers to overcome specific challenges together including achieving the vision of Software-Defined Vehicles and modernizing and connecting the OEM enterprise.
3. Partner solutions: AWS has vetted over 200 AWS Partners and collaborated on dozens of point solutions allowing customers to outsource innovation projects.
4. Professional Services: A rapidly growing team of automotive experienced solution architects, software engineers, and data scientists directly support customers who want to build their own solutions. AWS has aligned these offerings against the seven solution areas to help customers select and deploy the right services and solutions more quickly.

Solution Areas for Automotive and Mobility Customers

Software-Defined Vehicle

The AWS Software-Defined Vehicle solution area helps the industry more rapidly and cost-effectively achieve autonomous vehicle (AV) development and connected mobility improvements like advanced driving assistance systems (ADAS), end-to-end security from the vehicle to the cloud, seamless development and deployment of software, and the ability to continually update software in vehicles. This Software-Defined Vehicle solution area delivers the technology needed to build the next generation of software-centric platforms with centralized high performance compute platforms, capabilities for continuous software delivery (CI/CD) throughout the vehicle lifecycle, security, data management, and machine learning.

With AWS IoT FleetWise, automakers can easily collect and organize data in any format present in their vehicles (regardless of make, model, or options) and standardize the data format for easy data analysis in the cloud. AWS IoT FleetWise helps automakers efficiently transfer data to the cloud in near-real time using the service’s intelligent filtering capabilities that allow developers to reduce network traffic by selecting the data to transfer and defining rules for when to transfer it based on parameters like weather conditions, location, or vehicle type. Once the data is in the cloud, automakers can use it for applications like remotely diagnosing issues in individual vehicles, analyzing vehicle fleet health to help prevent potential recalls or safety issues, or improving advanced technologies like autonomous driving and advanced driver assistance systems with analytics and machine learning.

Previously announced BlackBerry IVY is a co-development effort that supports software-driven business models and operational improvements. It does so by addressing a critical data access, processing, and management problem: It runs on the edge, inside a vehicle’s embedded systems, but managed and configured from the cloud. With support for multiple operating systems and multi-cloud deployments, automakers can deliver new features, functionality, and experiences to customers over the lifetime of their vehicles.

AWS is also collaborating with Continental on its Continental Automotive Edge (CAEdge) platform. CAEdge is a modular hardware and software platform that connects the vehicle to the cloud and features a virtual workbench offering numerous options to develop, supply, and maintain software-intensive system functions.

In addition to technology, AWS recently announced a collaboration with Arm to help them deliver a new software architecture and reference implementation, Scalable Open Architecture for Embedded Edge (SOAFEE), and two new reference hardware platforms to accelerate the software-defined future of automotive.

“Major technology leaps are transforming vehicle electronics and software-architecture requirements, and driving the industry to a software-centric future. At AWS, we’re committed to innovation with key industry players like Arm to help solve complex challenges for delivering Software-Defined Vehicles with a service-oriented architecture,” said Bill Foy, Director, Worldwide Automotive Business Development at AWS. “In collaboration with Arm, and AWS’s Arm-based AWS Graviton2 instances, we can bring significant cost savings, and make it possible to run applications on the same architecture in the cloud and at the automotive edge to simplify developer workflow.”

Learn more about the Software-Defined solution area in AWS for Automotive.

Connected Mobility

Ranked number one Connected Car Cloud Platform by ABI Research, and named 2020 Company of the Year, Global Automotive Cloud Services Platform for Mobility by Frost & Sullivan, the AWS Connected Mobility capability allows customers to unlock the power of data to build intelligent, personalized features and revenue-generating mobility services. This solution area is anchored by the recent launch of its second generation Connected Mobility Solution (CMS). This solution is a vetted reference architecture that contains building blocks to accelerate the development and global deployment of connected vehicles and services. AWS CMS includes software modules to securely manage the lifecycle of in-vehicle edge compute, machine learning inference models, cloud data ingest, storage, business logic, and APIs to power applications in the cloud.

Production deployments range from e-scooter fleets with tens of thousands of units to global rental car and OEM fleets scaling into the millions of connected vehicles. Customers including Toyota, BMW, and Stellantis have reduced their connected vehicle costs by moving from fixed on-premises IT infrastructure to pay-as-you-go, serverless resources based on AWS.

In addition to AWS built and owned services and solutions, AWS is working with globally recognized semiconductor, systems integrator, and software companies to implement its CMS to create a variety of solutions. NXP and MOTER (Mobility On the Edge in Realtime) collaborated with AWS to create a usage-based insurance solution that leverages edge computing data science software to extract the value of vehicle data through computational analysis performed on the vehicle. Other AWS Partner solutions built on CMS include: WirelessCar’s Fleet Management Solution, DXC Luxoft End-to-End Connected Vehicle Solution, Capgemini Trusted Vehicle Solution, NXP & AWS Connected EV Solution, NXP’s Connected Electric Vehicle (EV) Management Solution, Accenture’s Electric Vehicle Roaming Solution, and the Sibros Deep Connected Platform.

Learn more about the Connected Mobility solution area in AWS for Automotive.

Autonomous Mobility

Amazon’s 20 years of experience with autonomous systems, robotics, and machine learning have benefited Autonomous Development customers including Argo, Aurora Innovation, Mobileye, BMW, Continental, Daimler’s Torc Robotics, Embark, Hyundai, Nissan, Valeo, Momenta, TuSimple, Toyota’s Woven Planet, Starship, TuSimple, and WeRide. They rely on AWS for many capabilities including highly scalable compute services and advanced deep learning frameworks that allow for the collection, ingestion, storage, and analysis of autonomous vehicle data to support full-scale AV development.

“The ease with which AWS services are speedily developed and expanded with scalability plays a fundamental role in the creation of an open, automatic map generation platform. We plan for the platform to be used by both Toyota vehicles and third-party partners.” –Mandali Khalesi, Automated Driving VP, Toyota Research Institute – Advanced Development, Inc.

At the center of AV development is the recently deployed Autonomous Driving Data Lake (ADDL) Solution, currently being implemented by global OEMs. The AWS ADDL Solution is the single source of truth for storing, cataloging, and searching autonomous vehicle data. This solution ties all engineering teams together around a flexible and scalable data flywheel that aligns all phases of development, from ingest through annotation, model development, simulation, testing, and validation.

AWS also developed specialized solutions and first-party managed services for machine learning such as Amazon SageMaker and Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth. Amazon SageMaker allows developers and data scientists to quickly build, train, and deploy machine learning models at scale, simplifying workflows and allowing faster iteration. Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth provides 2D and 3D first-party labeling services. AWS also provides differentiated silicon with AWS Graviton, AWS Inferentia, and AWS Tranium for environmental parity needed to accommodate many of the simulation and validation functions of AV development.

The deep AWS Partner community also created autonomous development solutions including: The DXC Luxoft Robotic Drive Cloud, which provides tools, services, and a base backend cloud platform to accelerate the build of autonomous driving functions and software. Additionally, Capgemini created the Driving Automation Systems Validation solution that solves for the complex validation and verification tasks for ADAS and AV customers. AWS has also vetted a number of point solutions per function in the overall development workflow from Siasearch, Akridata, NVIDIA, dSpace, Vector, MathWorks, Scale, Applied Intuition, Cognata, IPG, Fortellix, and DeepMap.

Learn more about the Autonomous Mobility solution area in AWS for Automotive.

Digital Customer Engagement

AWS helps customers to deliver relevant marketing content, intelligent digital experiences, and real-time data analysis and recommendations. AWS customers develop and maintain ongoing customer relationships with tools for evaluating campaign effectiveness, tracking attribution, adjusting tactics in real time, and more.

The AWS Partner Network has also developed several solutions, including the WirelessCar Automated Contact Center and the ZeroLight SpotLight Suite. The WirelessCar Automated Contact Center captures vehicle data and integrates that information into an automated contact center from start to finish. The solution uses Amazon Connect, an easy-to-use omnichannel cloud contact center, and Machine Learning on AWS. By using these services, WirelessCar has increased customer satisfaction and loyalty, reduced OEM costs, and provided OEMs with qualitative insights.

Automotive visualization software specialist ZeroLight offers SpotLight Suite, a cloud-based platform that brands, agencies, and dealers use to customize sales and marketing to each shopper. SpotLight users create personalized sales materials with visual content production informed by the car models that shoppers build with ZeroLight’s Palette and Palette+ configurators.

AWS also is assembling key players across the Amazon network so OEMs can create their own digital showrooms, personalized in-vehicle voice experiences, payment capability, home connectivity and more with Amazon Alexa, Fire TV, Ring, Amazon Pay, and more.

Learn more about the Digital Customer Engagement solution area in AWS for Automotive.

Supply Chain

Original equipment manufacturers can improve manufacturing operations and overall equipment effectiveness by capturing, analyzing, and visualizing plant floor data as well as gain the end-to-end supply chain visibility necessary to track and trace the entire production process with unprecedented efficiency.

As modern supply chains continue to expand, they also are becoming more complex and disparate. They require a unified view of data, as well as the ability to independently verify their transactions, such as production and transport updates. Solutions built using AWS services—such as Amazon Managed Blockchain, Amazon Forecast, and AWS IoT Core—provide the end-to-end visibility to track and trace entire production process, increase demand planning accuracy, optimize buying decisions, manage carbon tracking and more. AWS customers have been able to achieve up to a 20% improvement in forecast accuracy, which creates downstream benefits such as improving capacity utilization by up to 10%.

More mature partner solutions currently delivering for automotive customers include the Campfire Interactive Profitability and Network Risk solution. Campfire Interactive’s strategic relationship with AWS provides automotive businesses with an end-to-end solution to unlock profit potential within a highly reliable, scalable, cost-effective, cloud-based infrastructure platform.

Learn more about the Supply Chain solution area in AWS for Automotive.

Manufacturing

To increase efficiency, automotive manufacturers need to implement advanced analytics, IoT, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML) capabilities. This requires connecting millions of disparate machines and analyzing massive amounts of data to uncover insights, develop automation tools, and predict potential issues such as equipment failure or product defects.

AWS provides the most comprehensive and advanced set of Industrial IoT, AI, and ML solutions available to connect and manage machines and systems across a global supply chain, generate actionable insights with real-time and predictive analytics, and improve quality and efficiency while reducing downtime and costs.

AWS services and solutions in the Manufacturing solution area include AWS Lookout for Equipment, Amazon Monitron, Amazon Lookout for Vision, AWS Panorama, Amazon Virtual Andon, and the Machine to Cloud Connectivity Framework.

Amazon Lookout for Equipment analyzes the data from equipment sensors (for example, pressure in a generator, flow rate of a compressor, revolutions per minute of fans), to automatically train a machine learning model based on a customers’ data specific to their equipment—with no ML expertise required. Amazon Monitron captures vibration and temperature data from equipment via wireless sensors, which can be set up in minutes using the Amazon Monitron mobile app with no ML experience or development work required. Amazon Lookout for Vision is an ML service that uses computer vision (CV) to spot defects in manufactured products at scale. AWS Panorama is a machine learning Appliance and Software Development Kit (SDK) that allows organizations to bring CV to on-premises cameras to make predictions locally with high accuracy and low latency. The Amazon Virtual Andon solution provides a scalable Andon system to help optimize processes, support the transition to predictive maintenance, and prevent future equipment issues. The Machine to Cloud Connectivity Framework provides operational technology (OT) managers with secure machine and industrial equipment connectivity to AWS.

AWS also co-developed with the Volkswagen Group to create the Volkswagen Industrial Cloud—thus launching a new era for digitally networked production worldwide. The Volkswagen Industrial Cloud brings together data from all machines, plants and systems in all factories. This allows VW to analyze its processes even better to become more productive. Its long-term goal is to integrate the global supply chain for more than 30,000 locations and 1,500 partner companies into the Volkswagen Industrial Cloud.

Partner Solutions in the Manufacturing solution area include Siemens, Hitachi Vantara Lumada Industrial Solutions, and Autodesk Forge.

Learn more about the Manufacturing solution area in AWS for Automotive.

Product Engineering

Vehicle designers and engineers from companies including TuSimple, Rivian, Formula 1, and Zoox have achieved quicker design turnaround times, accelerated engineering development, and derived valuable insights by leveraging design, test, and simulation data in a fully traceable manner in the cloud.

AWS automotive customers have solved complex problems faster using model-based design and large-scale parallel simulations facilitated by AWS High Performance Computing (HPC). On-demand CPU, GPU, and FPGA servers optimized by AWS for specific applications help customers avoid the need for large capital investments or regular refresh cycles. AWS also provides engineers access to centralized data and compute power in the cloud, so they can work on the same files, on any device, anywhere—at maximum speed.

The AWS Computational Fluid Dynamics for automotive solution leverages one of the most powerful GPU instance available in the cloud, 100 Gbps of networking throughput, based on NVIDIA’s latest GPU Tesla V100 with 32GB of memory each and the largest Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) P3 instance size available.

Learn more about the Product Engineering solution area in AWS for Automotive.

We’re excited to see the introduction of this initiative help customers across the automotive industry accelerate their digital transformation. For more information on AWS for Automotive, visit thinkwithwp.com/automotive.