By George Senzere, solution architect: Secure Power at Schneider Electric

Today’s vehicles have become, if you’d excuse the pun, computer driven machines.  Software forms a vital part of the entire manufacturing lifecycle, from production to testing to in-car navigation.

However, with each manufacturing milestone up to decommissioning, modern vehicles generate a significant amount of data. Plus, if, if you add the connected vehicle or rather its evolved version, the Internet of Vehicles (IoV), we are dealing with mountains of data that require seamless processing and storage.

The evolution

Today’s cars have become bona fide connected machines and not merely an extension of our mobile devices such as smartphones.  And this connectivity has given way to intelligent vehicle networks that are drastically changing the landscape.

Vehicles feature a myriad of sensors which in turn generate huge amounts of data. These sensors are for example used to monitor safety, environmental parameters, and traffic.

And now we are on the verge of a yet another evolutionary step in transportation; the IoV is not only communicating information to the driver and manufactures but also other transport infrastructure.  It is becoming a network of objects, people, vehicles, and even smart city infrastructure.

Like the IoT, the IoV can through intuitive technologies such as AI can anticipate a driver’s intent and provide communications and intelligence, realising a safer and optimised driving experience.

With the IoV comes extensive consumption of big data which then fuels valuable business evidence-based decisions. Interestingly, big data has undoubtedly formed a part of the evolution that has led to IoV.

To understand IoV we have to look at the architecture. The IoV network is made up of three layers:

1. The bottom layer comprises sensors that measure and gather data such as driving patterns, detecting collisions, fuel consumption, braking and various other parameters. With wireless sensors like radio frequency identification (RFID), light detection and ranging (lidar) and radio detection and ranging (radar), the vehicles could map the environment three dimensionally and calculate the relative positions of other objects in a vehicle’s vicinity.
2. The second layer includes various sensors that are connected to the sensor platform via fifth generation mobile network (5G), Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, local area network (LAN), or wireless local area network (WLAN).
3. At the very top is the application layer.  This is made up of embedded applications and or others residing elsewhere on the network like the cloud, the edge and in adjacent infrastructure.

Data navigates the IoV

IoV is all about data, whether real-time or historical. Translating this data results in valuable information to enable real-time decision making, safety and to continue to fuel innovation.

Vehicle manufacturers must harness the value of data. In the IoV opportunities will open for many other players. Those that will succeed will be able to connect everything that can be connected, gather the data, process it, and draw real, meaningful insights from it. The infrastructure to collect this data is going to be key.

The bulk of the infrastructure needed for IoV will lean on industrial edge computing. Vehicle owners will have the convenience of being connected, avoid traffic congestion, improved road safety without too many fatalities.

As for facility operators, this could be the dawn of intelligent traffic and parking management as well as vehicle tracking systems. Manufacturers on the other hand will not be left behind, industrial edge will enable them to become highly automated and benefit from connected and uninterrupted production systems that are fully in tune with customer needs and wants