ASAM US-Meeting 2016: Standardizing with ASAM

Dr. Klaus Estenfeld, the new managing director at ASAM e.V., presented an overview of ASAM and its objectives. Specifically, Dr. Estenfeld noted the growing international community and identified some of the measures that ASAM has taken to increase international collaboration, regardless of time and regional constraints. A more open standardization process and new collaboration opportunities all contribute to advance the international ASAM community. ASAM continuously considers new ways to further engage international members.

Mr. Joseph Sparacino, the Business Development Manager at ASAM e.V., provided an update on current ASAM projects and outlined the recently released standards. This year, two completely new standards, ASAM MCD-2 CERP and ASAM CPX, have begun to capture expert knowledge within the Standard itself. He highlighted the fact that two new initiatives were started by North American companies. The first project, "Big Data Technologies for ASAM ODS", started as a series of workshops in the US and developed into a truly international effort with participants from European and North American member companies. The second topic driven by US members, “Telematics” or Remote Two Way Communication is still clarifying sub projects but will be heading to a proposal workshop soon. 

Ms. Stefanie Amrite, Senior Product Manager at National Instruments, presented the benefits of embedding ASAM standards into the entire development tool chain for components, powertrains, and complete vehicles. She highlighted that ASAM standards benefit both end users and tool vendors. The standardization process helps end users discuss and document requirements to address common, non-competitive problems. By working together directly with tool vendors, end users strive to implement tools with no or only little integration effort. In turn, tool vendors and telematics service providers have a common set of requirements to work against, instead of slightly different versions for each end user.  Ms. Amrite also stated that ASAM standards help in building best in class, globally supported tools. 

Two speakers, Mr. Mark Quinsland from DataStax and Dr. Larry Hilkene from Cummins, presented current issues that drive the Automotive Industry.

Mr. Quinsland reported that automotive end users are increasingly working together with big data organizations from Silicon Valley to develop solutions to store mass quantities of different shaped data, to surface interesting connections between data, and to analyze data in order to reduce product development time. In that context, vehicle telematics data also becomes a data source as a “rolling test bed”. He identified that these new areas require additional standards to reduce development time.

Dr. Hilkene, Product Cybersecurity Leader at Cummins, discussed from a Tier-1 point of view, how each new technology increases the exposure to threats immensely for on- or off-road vehicles. Dr. Hilkene also explained his role on the Auto-ISAC and how the End User organizations need to work together to identify and prevent attacks.

Both speakers see the need for US and global companies to work together on these challenges. Personal networks, common requirements, standards, and toolsets may help to provide a solution. 

At the end of the meeting, Mr. Gorance Eftimovski from Cummins and a member of the ASAM Board of Directors, discussed the future of ASAM in North America. The subsequent Q&A session offered the North American membership a forum to provide feedback on an ASAM membership, to input ideas for future projects and to reduce barriers for participation in ASAM.

The overall feedback of the participants was very positive. The half day meeting was regarded as very informative and useful and the ASAM membership requested similar meetings in the future. If you would like to provide feedback on the past meeting or if you would like to make a recommendation for a future US-Meeting, please don't hesitate to contact us: dorothee.bassermann(at)asam.net