Innovative Impulses from the ASAM International Conference 2015 on Big Data

ASAM is investigating big data topics for standardization: The second International Conference focused on Big Data in Future Car Development – Chances for Engineering, Value for the Driver. The conference gave an overview on current best practices from the car industry and opened up the discussion with the IT industry.

HOEHENKIRCHEN 2015 – More than 130 industry managers and experts from 12 countries traveled to Dresden to discuss “Big Data in Future Car Development” at the second ASAM International Conference 2015. From 08 – 09.12.2015, OEMs, Tier-1s, Suppliers, and Universities presented best practices and current projects from their companies. Representatives from big data service providers, such as IBM, Teradata, Cray and DataStax gave examples on how big data is currently being used both in the Auto Industry and in other Industries. They emphasized the potentially large return on investment of big data and analysis and highlighted some of the large pitfalls.

In the attached exhibition, several companies showcased their latest products in data acquisition and integration, data mining, and analytics. The inviting atmosphere at the congress center and at the historic dinner location provided an excellent setting for conversations and discussions.

The conference was “…an excellent way to evaluate the current state of big data in the automotive industry” summed up one of the attendees. “Handling big data is an integral engineering task” stated another. Many of the attendees pointed out the excellent opportunity for networking: “The attendees are open for this kind of approach”, was the conclusion of a third attendee.

ASAM has also received valuable suggestions, particularly for improving the data management Standard ASAM ODS. While everyone agreed that ASAM ODS has been a well-established Standard, everyone also agreed that the base technology of ASAM ODS needs to be updated and prepared for Big Data use cases. Since mid-2015, two new ASAM project groups are working on the refinement of ASAM ODS: One project group currently substitutes CORBA as the backbone for ODS client-server communication with a modern technology based upon Protobuf and REST, while the other group is collecting use cases and developing a prototype to guide technology choices and application definitions to make ASAM ODS fit for use in Big Data systems.

It was agreed that cooperation both among the equipment manufacturers and the IT Industry will be essential to meet the future challenges of Big Data. ASAM provides the platform to meet, discuss and commonly develop new standards for the Automotive Big Data domain.

About ASAM ODS

The ASAM ODS (Open Data Services) Standard focuses on persistent information storage and retrieval. It provides a reliable basis for applications that produce and / or consume information. The standardized interfaces and common data structures minimize the efforts for system integration within heterogeneous environments and ease information exchange significantly. ASAM ODS allows cross-disciplinary exchange of data and makes data storage and retrieval independent from specific implementations.

About ASAM e.V.

ASAM e.V. coordinates the development of technical standards. These standards define protocols, data models, file formats and application programming interfaces (APIs) for the use in the development and testing of automotive electronic control units. A large amount of popular tools in the areas of Simulation, Measurement, Calibration and test automation are compliant to ASAM standards. Compliance shall guarantee interoperability of tools from different vendors, allow data exchange without the need for converters, and facilitate the exchange of unambiguous Specification between customers and suppliers.

Founded in 1998 as a German association, ASAM has today more than 140 international members, including major OEMs in Germany, France, US, Japan, and China. ASAM has a portfolio of 22 standards among them the well established MCD (measuring, Calibration, Diagnostics)-standards with a market distribution of up to 80% worldwide. The infrastructural standards of ASAM are used by many of the big international OEMs.