USAGE OF VEHICLE, DRIVER DATA TO IMPROVE USER EXPERIENCE

The road vehicle is becoming more and more a digital platform. It generates torrents of potentially valuable data via a multitude of on-board sensors that process information from GPS to lidar. The challenge for the automotive industry as well as IT service providers like Ness Digital Engineering is how to transform thousands of gigabytes of raw data into useful insights and new business revenue. When it comes to the ways connected passenger cars will transform and improve the customer experience, the players are just beginning to envision the possibilities.

- KETAN KARIA

WHAT’S ON THE ROAD AHEAD

The automotive industry is transforming thanks to a combination of concurrent industrial and software engineering. On-board systems architectures of the vehicle are moving away from a monolithic stack to a service-oriented, connected, containerized architecture that allows for new types of sensors and their data to be rapidly integrated into a vehicle platform. Therefore, many gigabytes of raw data have to be transformed into useful insights and new revenue streams, 1.

This is making the data consolidation of Electronic Control Units (ECUs) easier, fusing the capabilities of sensors such as radar, lidar, ultrasonic and external smart city platforms at a software level. This creates a level of accuracy in sensing that can improve the capabilities of today’s SAE level 2 advanced driver assistance systems for automating control of speed and lane position, for example, and bring level 3 (limited self-driving in some situations) and level 4 (full self-driving under certain conditions) degrees of autonomy closer to market-place reality.

More varied and sophisticated applications for the dashboard and the cloud – using edge architectural principles – are ushering in a new hybrid. On-board systems with artificial intelligence that analyse data for real-time automated driver assistance decision making for level 2 semi-automated driving are already being seen. Cars will soon gain the ability to combine on-board information with offboard data and process it in the cloud to derive additional – even yet unknown – insights and experiences.