Connected mobility for fleet management and monitoring

Having bespoke software solutions that are precisely tailored to meet your specific needs and business objectives bring flexibility and control to fleet management. However, building such software in-house is often unfeasible in terms of tech talent and timelines, and on top of that, not economically viable. That’s why many leading automakers turn to ready-made platforms or SaaS products to reduce implementation complexity, accelerate time-to-market and manage costs.

While this approach does yield quicker results, it may not be flexible enough to accommodate highly specialized business logic of internal processes, or it may not provide the desired degree of differentiation of external-facing user experience that automotive customers usually require. As a custom solutions provider with an established tradition of engineering excellence and over 20 years’ experience in the automotive industry, Zoreza Global is well-positioned to help automakers achieve the best of both worlds — creating the sophisticated solutions expected by dynamic businesses of today, while minimizing time-to-value.

As a recognized innovator in the automotive industry, we help automakers accelerate their transformation to software-defined vehicles. Our clients are consistently interested in custom connected mobility solutions, particularly where fleet management is concerned: These solutions include advanced monitoring features with the capability of easily configurable data collection, intelligent vehicle data analytics, and flexible in-vehicle software component management.

We’re able to create our award-winning solutions because of our world-leading talent pool of engineers, but it’s strategic collaborations with key technology providers that enable us to help clients achieve the seemingly contradictory objectives of owning dynamic software solutions while minimizing time-to-value. One of the most foundational technologies that underpins this work, is the cloud — indeed, top cloud platforms offer some distinctive capabilities that cannot be replicated by any other means.

AWS has been making many investments in the automotive industry delivering a number of platform components that leverage and extend their platform, including AWS Connected Mobility Solution (CMS), AWS IoT FleetWise, AWS IoT Greengrass, AWS IoT Core and others. Through our long-standing partnerships with AWS we’ve been able to create a reference architecture that extends our Connected Mobility offering by leveraging the capabilities of the AWS cloud platform to deliver a custom connected mobility system that meets the diverse needs of our clients in an agile way.

This new Connected Mobility for Fleet Management and Monitoring offering is based on an advanced reference architecture that can be tailored based on client needs. In addition, it supports a broad range of automotive use cases, while providing quick time to market and value.

This offering target system is designed to support configurable vehicles’ sensors and diagnostic data collection and analysis, while also providing in-vehicle software components management.

It’s based on several capabilities of the AWS cloud; in particular AWS CMS, AWS IoT FleetWise, AWS IoT Greengrass and AWS IoT Core services.

The following diagram describes the complete system:

Let’s describe the components (numbered on the architectural diagram) that represent essential functional blocks of the system:

1. In-vehicle EDGE instance hosting a set of applications (AWS IoT Greengrass components) for data collection from the CAN-bus and OBD interface, making them available for other in-vehicle services via MQTT broker, pre-processing and transferring to the cloud backend for analytics. It also handles backward communication and processes commands received from the backend. The underlying Yocto project ecosystem allows performing bootstrapping of in-vehicle edge devices with a wide range of architectures.
2. AWS CMS stores the data and exposes it via Neutral Server as a set of vehicle parameters or ‘vehicle state’. AWS IoT Core as part of CMS, provides flexible device management and establishes a device-cloud communication channel.
3. AWS IoT FleetWise enables configured data collection on the cloud side and pushes it in real-time to vehicles without third-party OTA systems. The service also stores the data in the Amazon Timestream database for in-cloud analysis.
4. AWS IoT Greengrass provides a comprehensive and flexible way of managing and updating in-vehicle software components hosted on the EDGE instance.
5. The system can be integrated with a custom or third-party OTA system for enabling the functionality of in-vehicle software/firmware updates for components hosted outside the EDGE hardware instance.
6. Campaign Management web interface enables fleet operators to launch and monitor software update campaigns.
7. Fleet Management web interface allows fleet operators to manage connected devices, perform data collection and monitor vehicles/fleet health.
8. Additional component based on AWS services such as Amazon Quicksight provides data analytics capabilities and visual representation of results.
9. Amazon SageMaker AI/ML-based environment gives the possibility of enabling predictive diagnostic use cases.

The decision to base this solution architecture on AWS IoT FleetWise bring our clients the following benefits:

• Shortened time-to-value and reduced cost from a pluggable solution for in-vehicle data collection
• Possible integration with other AWS services, making the full power of AWS cloud available for building a fully customized solution, as desired
• Reduced operational burden by implementing security, logging, monitoring and data governance best practices using AWS Cloud Foundation services

In short, this new offering represents the best-of-both-worlds solution that is sought by so many automakers. This is achieved through collaboration with your turnkey software solution provider; Zoreza Global, in partnership with a best-in-class technology vendor; Amazon Web Services. If you’re interested in learning more about this offering, or if you have other questions, please reach out to us at AWSTeam@luxoft.com.