Azure Automotive Transformation in the Mobility Industry

Azure is revolutionizing the automotive industry with its cutting-edge technology and innovative solutions. This transformation is driven by the increasing demand for connected, autonomous, and sustainable vehicles.

Microsoft's Azure platform provides a comprehensive suite of tools and services that enable automotive companies to develop and deploy intelligent transportation systems. With Azure, automakers can create more efficient, safer, and more enjoyable driving experiences.

Azure's cloud-based services, such as Azure IoT Hub and Azure Machine Learning, allow automakers to collect and analyze vast amounts of data from vehicles, sensors, and other sources. This data can be used to improve vehicle performance, reduce emissions, and enhance safety features.

Azure Automotive Solutions offers a range of benefits for automotive developers, including accelerated onboarding, efficient development, and streamlined validation processes.

Developers can implement a fully configured automotive development environment to accelerate onboarding, simulating the behavior of various hardware and software combinations to reduce dependency on edge or in-vehicle silicon.

The Azure Automotive Solutions platform supports autonomous driving by accelerating efficiency and improving safety verification and validation, integrating multiple development processes and environments into a unified platform.

AVOps, a key component of Azure Automotive Solutions, automates the entire development process from code commit to production, monitoring pipelines, infrastructure, and products in production for anomalies.

Here are some of the key areas where AVOps accelerates autonomous vehicle development:

In the automotive industry, innovation is key to staying ahead of the curve. Autonomous vehicle operations design guides provide an overview of how to create a back end to enable autonomous vehicle development at scale.

Developers can benefit from fully configured automotive development environments to accelerate onboarding. This can be achieved through efficient development, where simulations of various hardware and software combinations reduce dependency on edge or in-vehicle silicon early in the development process.

Simulating complex driving scenarios is essential for autonomous vehicle development. Building blocks for autonomous-driving simulation environments provide an example architecture to automate driving tests, develop control systems, record vehicle data, and simulate complex driving scenarios.

The AVOps reference architecture integrates all development processes into one platform, from DataOps, MLOps, and DevOps to ValidationOps. This includes DataOps, which ingests measurement data such as videos, images, lidar, and radar, and curates and extracts data.

AVOps centralized functions provide overarching functionalities like metadata search, data catalog, overall orchestration, platform governance, and standardized infrastructure templates. These functions are crucial for accelerating the development of autonomous vehicles.

Here are some key use cases for Azure Automotive Solutions:

By leveraging these solutions, automotive companies can accelerate their development of autonomous vehicles and stay ahead of the competition.

The factory system commissions the vehicle device to the desired construction state, including firmware and software initial installation and configuration.

Commissioning involves obtaining and writing the device certificate, which is created by the public key infrastructure provider.

The device registration application registers the device identity in the device provisioning and device registry.

The factory system registers the vehicle and device via the vehicle and device provisioning API.

Device registration involves storing information about authentication and authorization in Microsoft Entra ID.

Event Grid manages authorization for allowed topics via the device information stored in Microsoft Entra ID.

The OEM dealer system triggers the registration of a new device if a part replacement is required.

Here's an overview of the device registration process:

Workflow is a crucial aspect of Azure Automotive, enabling developers to streamline their processes and create efficient solutions. A great example of this is the deployment of vECUs, which can be set up in minutes using a Microsoft dev box.

This dev box is preconfigured with all the required development tools and extensions, making it easy for developers to get started. The developer can then create and connect to the dev box, perform a check-out of the automotive application code, and adjust configurations as needed.

Here's a step-by-step overview of the deployment process:

Another important workflow in Azure Automotive is the deployment of an automotive software stack. This stack synchronizes its state with the Azure cloud, enabling digital products and services that don't require a direct connection to the car.

The stack has several components, including a service registry, dynamic topic management, in-vehicle digital twin service, and digital twin cloud synchronization. These components work together to enable services within the vehicle to be registered and discovered, and to synchronize the local state of the vehicle with the state in the cloud.

Here's a step-by-step overview of the software stack deployment process:

AVOps accelerates autonomous vehicle development by streamlining engineering development into a single repository, data lake, and workflow.

By automating the entire process from code commit to production, AVOps saves time and reduces complexity. This allows developers to focus on innovation, accelerating innovation through shared code, data, models, and training pipelines.

AVOps also replicates the exact vehicle models in the cloud to accelerate time to market. This enables faster development and testing of autonomous driving systems.

Here are the key areas where AVOps excels: