Sonatus Automator Enhances Software-Defined Vehicle Lifecycle at IAA MOBILITY 2023

The pace of change has shifted into overdrive. With our increasingly digital lives, automotive customers are getting more demanding, expecting up-to-date products and services at a faster rate. Vehicle platforms that take years to bring to market and months to update are struggling to keep up with consumer demand. Software-defined vehicles (SDVs) and over-the-air (OTA) updates help address this disparity, but they still fall short of closing the agility gap. 

Presently, adding or modifying features on SDV is still an arduous process, requiring full-scale application development, testing, and integration, and OTA updates are time-consuming and bandwidth-hungry. OEMs need a way to accelerate innovation and provide competitive features and the experiences that customers want throughout the lifecycle of their vehicles. Current SDV architectures may not be the answer, but they help provide the path. 

Sonatus has recently announced our approach to help OEMs achieve this required agility – deploying lightweight workflow recipes, rather than new code, to carry out a series of actions. Sonatus Automator is the newest product in their Sonatus Vehicle Platform, 

Automator provides the ability to rapidly enable vehicle functions, trigger features or perform diagnostics without code changes, which often require a complete software development and validation cycle, or complex OTA updates.  

How does it work? 

1. Each new feature or test automation routine is defined as a workflow recipe that consists of one or more tasks, and each task consists of one or more triggers followed by one or more actions. 
2. Flexible workflows can be pipeline, tree, or graph-based. 
   • State machine-based workflows are also supported. 
3. Through an intuitive, GUI-based interface, recipes are created and deployed to one vehicle or to entire fleets. 

Automator offers easy-to-create, easy-to-deploy workflows that allow for greater agility. Moreover, it opens up new use cases across prototyping, feature personalization, production testing, post-sales service and maintenance, and downstream value-added services such as fleet management and other vehicle monetization.

Pre-Sale: 

1. Feature prototyping: Workflow recipes allow product designers to trial and refine potential features before committing them to code. 
2. Testing: Automated self-testing recipes enable cost-effective, large-scale end-of-line testing, and, if a problem is found after assembly, a recipe can be deployed to all vehicles before they’re shipped. 
3. Production updates: Problems identified through customer feedback can be rapidly fixed in vehicles still under production before a permanent code solution is applied. 

Post-Sale: 

1. Rapid upgrades: Workflow recipes enable new capabilities on vehicles after sale in just minutes, before developing and rolling out new final code. 
2. Field diagnostics: Self-tests activated through workflow recipes can diagnose and, in some cases, fix issues, giving OEMs insight into how their vehicles are performing and catching problems early to avoid expensive recalls. 
3. Service improvements: Vehicles can report behavior and performance, flag when maintenance or repair is needed, and communicate with auto shops so parts are available and work can be completed quickly. 
4. Fleet management: Fleet owners can quickly carry out large-scale actions, such as locking all vehicles, or individual actions such as having a specific vehicle report its location. 
5. Driver personalization: Owners can even develop their own recipes to integrate their vehicle with their home automation systems (turn on the house lights as the car pulls into the driveway) or configure in-car settings for certain drivers. 

 
In addition,Sonatus willbe showcasingproducts already in production: Sonatus Foundation and  Sonatus Collector are already rolling down the road in production vehicles from Hyundai Kia and Genesis. Collector enables dynamic vehicle data collection that allows OEMs to improve vehicle quality and customer experience throughout the lifetime of vehicles.  
 
You find Sonatus at Hall B2, Stand A20!