Data is the new currency - now also in the automotive industry!

Data is the new currency. This is something that Facebook, Amazon & Co. proved long ago with their meteoric success. At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, EDAG, the Wiesbaden-based engineering partner, will be showing ways in which the automotive industry can develop new business segments with the networked, self-driving vehicle.

Today's vehicles are gigantic suppliers of information, and like an enormous swarm, they record a constant stream of data 24 hours a day. The many sensors and systems installed in them make this possible.
"Apart from internal vehicle or manufacturer applications, this enormous potential remains largely untapped. Our business model proposes bringing about the industry-wide, central consolidation of this vehicle data, and then qualifying and converting it so that it is suitable for the services of automotive and non-automotive partners," explains Jürgen Vogt, EDAG Group CEO. It centres on an analysis technique which intelligently links and interprets the gigantic amount of vehicle data generated, and then condenses it into marketable data packages and digital services.

EDAG's business model opens up a large number of potential marketing scenarios. Vehicles can become weather stations, for example. "Thanks to the number of mobile data suppliers on the road, we could provide the weather services with an unprecedented, up-to-the-minute information quality," explains Johannes Barckmann, a member of EDAG's Innovations team. However, added value does not occur until the separate data types, for instance GPS, temperature information or documented feedback from the chassis system, are linked. The camera systems installed in the vehicles could also give rise to another digital service. The recorded images could provide the mobile community with an intelligent parking system: information on free parking spots in the city is continually recorded and up-dated, and made available to drivers without delay. The vehicle data recorded could also be of interest to insurance companies and policy holders. Speeds that are recorded, information from distance sensors, the number of revs measured, braking manoeuvres and spot-on regional weather data could be intelligently combined and evaluated. The driver could, with his driving style, help to influence the amount of his own insurance premium.

For its analysis technique, the EDAG Group has implemented and further developed intelligent database and cluster systems such as Spark, hadoop, Kafka, elastic or cassandra. The partners' data is saved, analysed, contextually linked and interpreted on the EDAG servers.

EDAG is currently developing a system for recording road damage to provide greater safety and driving comfort for a German premium manufacturer. Via the chassis sensors, the precise location of road damage is detected, transmitted to a central computer, permanently catalogued and evaluated. This information is continually relayed to all customer vehicles of the manufacturer, and the chassis is adjusted in anticipation of approaching road damage.

Data is the new currency - now also in the automotive industry!
Data has developed into the new currency, and brought about new and moreover highly profitable business models. EDAG aims to transfer the potential of the data gathered by vehicles worldwide into digital service models and market these across the various branches of industry. The idea is not just to collect the data and sell it to third parties; the car owner should also profit. This means that the driver can decide for himself which vehicle data to release, and is rewarded on this basis, receiving either money or some kind of profit (like a lower premium in the case of the insurance proposal).

BFFT - EDAG Engineering GmbH subsidiary - presents the subject of connectivity in Barcelona
Connectivity has long been an accepted part of everyday life. The networked world offers more comfort, but at the same time also implies greater technical challenges: smartphones, for instance, have to be compatible with different operating systems, apps, and the software of other devices – in the smart home environment for example – and work at all times. Due to the large variety of systems and apps which, moreover, are regularly modified by updates, a constant and valid end-to-end validation becomes an extremely complex task.

As a means of meeting these highly complex requirements, EDAG subsidiary BFFT will be presenting its automation framework "CShark" in Barcelona. "CShark" is a modular automation framework, specially developed for the validation of complex services. It can be used to automatically test the various components either individually or in the complete end-to-end chain. The tests can be easily managed and started using an online portal or an app. "From here, the test results can also be directly evaluate and distributed," explains Markus Fichtner, CEO of BFFT. Besides integrating software and apps in the automation framework, BFFT also offers the customer-specific connection of hard-ware components in the system, which is an in-house development. "CShark" has been applied in standard production since 2016, and is currently being used for the end-to-end validation of various mobile online services in the automobile sector.

"Our presentation at the Mobile World Congress documents the EDAG Group's departure into the digital world. The subjects of big data and connectivity are becoming es-sential elements of EDAG's expertise in vehicle and production plant development. As a design engineering company that is helping to define the mobile future, we aim to use our own concepts to proactively shape the transformation process," affirms Jürgen Vogt, EDAG Group CEO.

You will find EDAG at the World Mobile Congress in Hall 6.0, "Main Exhibition".