introduction
A connected vehicle platform gives fleet operators near real-time data on vehicle location, usage, and status. Having this data readily available helps fleet operators manage their fleets more efficiently, reduce operational costs, improve driver performance, and reduce vehicle downtime. A connected vehicle platform also provides an opportunity for automotive OEMs to offer their own telematics solutions to commercial customers as a value-added service when they sell or lease a vehicle. However, developing a connected vehicle platform can be challenging. You need to build your own device software, develop orchestration capabilities that tell the device software when and under what conditions to collect data, decode and process the data, and finally, organize the data in a way that provides useful insights to your customers. AWS services such as AWS IoT FleetWise can help you ease the heavy lifting associated with these challenges and help you build your solutions faster.
Volta Trucks is an electric commercial truck manufacturer headquartered in London, UK. The company recently launched the Volta Zero, a fully electric 16-ton truck aimed at urban operations. Deliveries are expected to begin in the second half of 2024. Volta Trucks is also launching a digital fleet platform that provides commercial fleet customers with predictive maintenance, route optimization, and performance management for their vehicles. The platform provides data collection and governance, reducing costs and providing the ability to quickly adjust and improve fleet operations based on data. Real-time data insights enable Volta Trucks to leverage generative AI capabilities to improve vehicle utilization, fleet manager productivity, and driver comfort.
Figure 1: The Volta Zero is an electric truck with a range of up to 200 km (125 miles) and a top speed of 90 km/h (56 mph).
“Our customers are transportation companies, fleet managers, and drivers, each with specific needs for flexibility and personalization. With AWS IoT FleetWise, we can build data collection campaigns focused on the specific data they need to provide tailored insights and customized capabilities for our customers and vehicle users. By collecting only the data they need, when they need it, we can build new solutions and develop AI-enabled services that adapt vehicles to the driver’s mission, context, and requirements.” – Martin Hofmann, Chief Technology Officer, Volta Trucks
Solution overview
Volta Trucks started by building a connected vehicle platform that would consolidate the various data points they needed from their vehicles and provide a foundation on which they could build fleet-wide insights for their internal and external customers. The challenge in building the platform was to determine how to provide meaningful near real-time insights to their customers while reducing the costs of data transmission and storage for the vast amounts of data coming from their trucks. Volta Trucks built the platform on top of AWS IoT FleetWise, which provides rules-based data collection, allowing Volta Trucks to define rules and events for when to transfer data to the cloud based on parameters such as temperature and speed changes for specific vehicle types. Volta Trucks customers often use the connected vehicle platform for asset tracking, which includes tracking critical vehicle telemetry and location of their Volta Zero electric trucks in near real-time.
EV Rally – London to Geneva
As a demonstration of the capabilities, a Volta Zero connected to an AWS IoT FleetWise enabled connected vehicle platform set off on a 2,000+ km round trip from London to Geneva. The event took place June 22-24 as part of the EV Rally, an event created to test the limits of zero-emission vehicles and technology. The following image shows the capabilities enabled and the type of data collected during the race, including location data, temperature, and battery charge status.
Figure 2: Vehicle geographic location.
Figure 3: Ambient air temperature, braking, and acceleration.
Figure 4: State of Charge (SoC) real-time insights and data collection.
Solution Walkthrough
In the vehicle domain, Volta Trucks deployed the Edge Agent for AWS IoT FleetWise in its Linux-based Telematics Control Units (TCUs), a set of open-source C++ libraries that helps vehicles connect to the cloud and receive instructions from the cloud about what data to collect and under what conditions.
In the cloud, Volta Trucks engineers used AWS IoT FleetWise APIs to create a vehicle knowledge graph. This graph provides a standardized data dictionary of signals, sensors, and actuators (300+ data points) across the entire fleet. They then configured decoding rules for these data points and passed them to the vehicle domain so that AWS IoT FleetWise could translate the raw bytes into human-readable values. Finally, they used AWS IoT FleetWise to collect data using both time- and event-based campaigns that periodically collected data such as GPS location, odometer readings, and battery health.
Let’s consider the solution step by step.
Volta’s AWS IoT FleetWise Edge Agent is deployed on the vehicles. The connection between the vehicles and AWS is established using AWS IoT Core. AWS IoT FleetWise pushes data campaigns and decode information to the vehicles using the AWS IoT Core connection. In the cloud, AWS IoT FleetWise enriches the data by adding campaign and vehicle identifiers, and timestamp information. AWS IoT FleetWise natively provides service metrics and logs collected in Amazon CloudWatch, allowing the team to easily troubleshoot when needed. The collected vehicle data is stored in Amazon Timestream and Amazon S3. Volta then queries and analyzes the data in Volta’s analytics and insights platform. The Volta team also set up a simple alerting system that tracks when trucks are disconnected and then reconnected. The alerts use lifecycle events from AWS IoT Core and use rules to publish these events to Amazon SNS topics that operators can subscribe to. The system enables them to closely monitor vehicles and respond accordingly if a vehicle remains disconnected for an extended period of time. For testing purposes, Volta deployed the AWS IoT FleetWise agent on ARM-based Graviton instances to simulate vehicles and enable rapid feedback cycles during development.
Conclusion
Volta Trucks used AWS IoT FleetWise to build a connected vehicle platform that provides commercial fleet customers with the ability to track vehicles, monitor driver behavior, and assess fleet status and health in near real-time. Using AWS services, Volta Trucks was able to rapidly develop and iterate on these features, scale, and reduce time to market. To learn more, visit the AWS IoT FleetWise site. We welcome your feedback and questions.
About the Author
Akshay Tandon is a Principal Product Manager at Amazon Web Services in the AWS IoT FleetWise team. He is passionate about all things automotive and products. He enjoys listening to customers and envisioning innovative products and services that meet their needs. At Amazon, he has led product initiatives in the areas of AI/ML with Alexa and Fleet Management with Amazon Transportation Services. He has 10+ years of product management experience.
Nuno Seco is a Senior Solutions Architect helping startups accelerate growth by building on AWS. With over 25 years of experience in software engineering, he ensures startups have what they need to make informed, intentional decisions and understand the various trade-offs.
Marco Massara is a Principal Business Development Manager in the AWS Automotive and Manufacturing Business Unit, supporting EMEA automotive customers on key initiatives related to software defined vehicles and connected mobility.
