IEEE SA Places Focus to Fuel the Future of Mobility

Transportation is all about moving goods and people from place to place. The mobility industry, which comprises roadways, railways, airways, and waterways, is undergoing disruptive changes driven by technological advancements, particularly information and communication technologies (ICTs). For example, the evolution of road transportation is driven by connectivity, increasing autonomy, electrification, and many new mobility services.

These innovations offer the potential of a new mobility ecosystem that enables people and goods to move faster, cheaper, cleaner, and safer than today, benefiting businesses and consumers across the globe.

As the mobility industry continues to evolve and transform, competition between businesses has accelerated in recent years. New and emerging technologies are often proprietary, resulting in increased costs, unresolved safety and security risks, fragmented markets, and limited economies of scale.

Standards bring together industry and market stakeholders – from designers and manufacturers to policymakers – to develop a consensus-based foundation from which everyone can work to enable consumer safety and public trust.

IEEE Standards Association (IEEE SA) has initiated standards projects to provide neutral, open, interoperable, and globally applicable solutions to various mobility domains:

• IEEE P802.1DP™ Standard for Time-Sensitive Networking Profile for Aerospace Onboard Ethernet Communications
• IEEE 1616™ – Standard for Motor Vehicle Event Data Recorder (MVEDR)
• IEEE 2977™ Standard for Adoption of MIPI Alliance Specification for A-PHY Interface (A-PHY) Version 1.0
• IEEE P2020™ Standard for Automotive System Image Quality
• IEEE P2846™ Assumptions for Models in Safety-Related Automated Vehicle Behavior
• IEEE P2851™ Standard for Exchange/Interoperability Format for Functional Safety Analysis and Functional Safety Verification of IP, SoC and Mixed Signal ICs

The modern mobility industry is built on connectivity that enables massive data exchange between sensors and all connected devices. This allows the application of sophisticated algorithms including AI to end up with higher levels of automation and eventually autonomous operation.

Since its creation, time-sensitive networking (TSN) has evolved from connecting stationary computers to serving as a standardized communication backbone in automobiles or factories.

The aerospace sector, however, is new to leveraging IEEE TSN standards. The lack of standardized TSN profiles makes the definition of the aerospace manufacturers’ requirements and the implementation of those requirements by suppliers more difficult and costly. Driven by the need to standardize the space, IEEE SA and SAE International are collaborating to develop standards for deploying secure, highly-reliable converged networks, and enable certification as a basis for compliance and design assurance.

IEEE P802.1DP will specify profiles of IEEE 802.1 Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) and IEEE 802.1 security standards for aerospace onboard bridged IEEE 802.3 Ethernet networks. The profiles select features, options, configurations, defaults, protocols, and procedures of bridges, end stations, and Local Area Networks to build deterministic networks for aerospace onboard communications.

By adopting this standard, the industry expects to benefit from scaling effects and cost benefits compared to proprietary technologies.

In 2004, driven by a lack of the uniform scientific crash data needed to make vehicle and highway transportation safer and reduce fatalities, IEEE SA developed IEEE 1616-2004, the first universal standard for motor vehicle event data recorders (MVEDR) much like those that monitor crashes on aircraft and trains.

Motor Vehicle Event Data Recorders (MVEDRs) collect, record, store, and export data related to motor vehicle pre-defined events in usage history. This standard defines a protocol for an MVEDR output data compatibility and export protocols of MVEDR data elements. It also defines a Motor Vehicle Event Data Recorder Connector Lockout Apparatus (MVEDRCLA)and a Near Field Communication (NFC) protocol of safeguarding access to a vehicle’s event data recorder (EDR) data by securing the vehicle output diagnostic a link connector (DLC) and establishing a chain of custody link.

The recently updated IEEE 1616 standard seeks to maintain privacy, prevent tampering, avoid odometer fraud, limit data access, and enhance safety by using an MVEDRCLA. The standard recognizes the value of improved crash information in improving the knowledge of what happens before, during, and after a motor vehicle crash. Such insights will provide major benefits to society and significantly improve the science of motor vehicle crashes.

Advancements in ADAS (Advanced Driver Assist Systems), In Vehicle Infotainment (IVI) and ADS (Autonomous Driving System) have driven a significant increase in the number of sensors, actuators, displays, and computing systems in today’s vehicles. At the same time, however, the physical layer interfaces (PHYs) that link these components across a vehicle have remained largely proprietary.

To date, automotive designs using the widely deployed MIPI Alliance Specification for Camera Serial Interface 2 (CSI-2) and MIPI Alliance Specification for Display Serial Interface 2 (DSI-2) interfaces for cameras and displays have relied on “bridges” to connect shorter-reach MIPI PHYs to these longer-reach proprietary PHYs.

In order to bridge these proprietary approaches, IEEE SA approved the MIPI Alliance–MIPI A-PHY Specification Version 1.0 as an IEEE standard, namely IEEE 2977, through the IEEE SA Industry Affiliate Network. It will enable automotive Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) and suppliers to reduce requirements for these bridges, simplify their designs, and cut costs, complexity, weight, and power consumption.

As the first industry-wide standard on long-reach asymmetric SerDes, IEEE 2977 is intended to deliver performance, reliability, and high noise immunity to EMI effects in automotive and IoT applications. Widely available to global manufacturers, the standard aims to broaden the automotive ecosystem, fostering greater interoperability, more choices, and greater economies of scale.

Cameras are being used in greater numbers in automotive applications for their greater importance for communications and safety. But most of these systems have been developed independently with no standardized calibration or measurement of image quality. Consumers do not have a standard reference point when using camera enabled systems, and OEM/Tier 1 developers cannot compare camera systems side by side.

The IEEE P2020 Standard aims to address the fundamental attributes that contribute to image and quality for automotive Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) applications, as well as identifying existing metrics and other useful information relating to these attributes. It defines a standardized suite of objective and subjective test methods for measuring automotive camera image quality attributes, and it specifies tools and test methods to facilitate standards-based communication and comparison among OEM and Tier 1 system integrators and component vendors regarding automotive ADAS image quality.

As a result, this standard will help enable consistency and create cross-industry reference points.

The continuing advancements in automated driving systems (ADS) holds the promise to make automated vehicles a reality. To deliver safety benefits and reduce economic costs, government and industry alike are in need of an open, transparent, and technology-neutral standard that provides industry consensus guidance on identifying reasonable and foreseeable assumptions used by models, in specific scenarios useful for evaluating the performance of an ADS.

The IEEE P2846 Working Group, made up of industry experts from Intel and other organizations, worked to standardize the minimum set of reasonable assumptions used in foreseeable scenarios to be considered for road vehicles in the development of safety-related models that are part of an ADS. The standard includes consideration of rules of the road and their regional and/or temporal dependencies.

In accordance with the IEEE SA Standards Board Operations Manual, subclause 6.3 (Patents) and subclause 6.4 (IEEE Standard Document Structure), the Informative portion of the standard identifies attributes of suitable models including best practices for balancing ADS assumptions with rules of the road used in the context of the Dynamic Driving Task. The Informative portion also identifies methods that may be used to verify whether an implementation conforms to the minimum set of required reasonable assumptions used in foreseeable scenarios, and defines an example model conformant with the standard.

The development of Intellectual Properties (IPs) and Systems on Chip (SoCs) for functional safety critical applications is rapidly emerging due to the growth of applications such as automated driving or robotics. Many existing standards such as ISO 26262 and IEC 61508 require IP vendors and SoC providers to tailor the analysis and verification activities that apply to them and deliver results to system integrators. Electronic Design Automation (EDA) vendors have also started to provide tools to automate those activities.

However, there are currently no common methodologies, languages, or formats to provide those results. Also, there is not a cohesive view of all those activities that are executed. As a result of this gap, companies are struggling with many different types of methodologies and description languages and are investing valuable time and effort to reconsolidate, compare, integrate, and combine the data.

The IEEE P2851 standard project was established to help accelerate the safety engineering process while reducing risks and costs by defining and delivering a comprehensive view of all those activities. The standard will define a format for exchange/interoperability for analysis and verification activities (including requirements, safety cases, etc.) and facilitate companies in delivering results in a consistent way. Additionally, it aims to enable interoperability between tools.

The format will define languages, data fields, and parameters so that the result of those analyses and verification activities can be represented in a technology independent way. With this standard, industry players – such as automotive OEMs, Tier1 semiconductor suppliers, IP and SoC providers, and EDA vendors – will share a common ground for developing tools, SoCs, and IPs, for functional safety critical applications.

In conjunction with this standard project, the P2851 Working Group published a white paper that introduces the industry landscape for the development of dependable autonomous machines.

Looking ahead, new and emerging technologies in the mobility industry will continue to call for development and adoption of new standards. IEEE SA strives to provide a wide range of IEEE standards and initiatives related to mobility and furthering the digital transformation of transportation.

IEEE SA welcomes stakeholders from the industry to join the effort in facilitating a broad, open, cross-industry dialogue and developing standards and solutions for a safer, more connected, and more sustainable mobility industry.

Learn More About IEEE SA’s Work in Mobility and Get Involved in our Initiatives and Activities