Mousumi Mukhopadhyay
Cummins Inc.

Connected commercial vehicles present enormous opportunities for both the manufacturers, the fleet owners and the operators to drive productivity improvements throughout operation. Real-Time, over the air parameter changes, software updates, Diagnostics and prognostics enable increasing uptime and usefulness of the vehicle. Commercial vehicle may contain components from many different manufacturers – each manufacturer desiring to keep their product operating at the ideal conditions. However, it is not ideal for each manufacturer in the vehicle to have a dedicated telematics unit.

In 2016, Cummins proposed a standardization effort to securely and efficiently transmit data from each manufacturer to the vehicle in the field and from the vehicle to each manufacturer with mutually acceptable levels of access. The first steps were to define the basics –

• Authentication, authorization and security negotiation between each entity participating in the end to end data exchange.
• Interfaces for exchanging data/instructions between Manufacturer Cloud and telematics cloud/device. 

These two basic standards are to serve as the foundation for further standardization efforts – namely, data compression, OTA Update protocols, data exchange between manufacturer’s devices, and cybersecurity.