SOAFEE

Value Proposition

The SOAFEE SCOPE is to collaborate with automotive and software ecosystem across the value chain to deliver on following objectives:

• Deliver open and standards-based methodology to enable cloud-native software development for mixed critical workloads from cloud to automotive edge;
• Create, contribute, adopt into upstream standards to enable cloud-native development for mixed critical workloads;
• Deliver open source reference implementations, including free-to-reimplement APIs, to seed the ecosystems for open source and commercial solution creation, as well as interoperability;
• Create seed development platform for seamless cloud to automotive edge software development maximizing environmental parity across the compute continuum; and
• Enable a vibrant ecosystem of commercial partners delivering commercial products across the automotive stack, ensuring portability of software applications and enabling a path from cloud-based development to in-vehicle deployment.

SOAFEE aims to work with, and complement, existing industry consortiums, open source projects and standards bodies;. SOAFEE should act as a platform enabler for full stack solutions and should inherit best practices from upstream bodies that are defining interfaces and abstractions that help SOAFEE achieve its design goals.

Technology Description

SOAFEE is primarily focused on defining a methodology, adopting existing standards where applicable, to enable cloud-native development and subsequent deployment of automotive software.  SOAFEE development in the cloud takes advantage of cloud-native methodologies like containers, orchestration and virtualization to make applications portable across different hardware platforms, The use of cloud-based virtual platforms allows for early development of software when hardware is not available, and even when IP is first released but no silicon is available. 

The SOAFEE members showcase their technology or expertise through blueprints which are examples of software that is using the SOAFEE methodology.  These blueprints are then used by the SOAFEE technical committee to help develop the SOAFEE methodology further, and are available to both SOAFEE members and developers in general to accelerate their software development. 

The first SOAFEE blueprint was based on the Autoware AD stack, called the Open AD Kit, and has been used to showcase how the SOAFEE development methodology can be used to develop an autonomous driving application, including the use of containers and orchestrators, while running on a heterogeneous hardware platform that has Autoware applications running on high performance application processors, while the vehicle control functions are running on a real-time safety processor.

See more : https://autoware.org/open-ad-kit/