Presentation at CES 2023: Cognizant Mobility supports HOLON develop a production-ready, autonomous mover
The fully electrically autonomous mover addresses current social megatrends and drives the mobility of tomorrow
HOLON presents its fully electric autonomous mover for the first time at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2023 in Las Vegas. Cognizant Mobility supports HOLON develop the autonomous mover – HOLON is a company of the automotive supplier BENTELER focused on developing sustainable, inclusive, reliable and safe mobility solutions for urban environments worldwide. The vehicle addresses the social megatrends of urbanization, climate change, demographics and the associated traffic problems in cities. This is the world's first autonomous mover according to automotive standards – leading in safety, driving comfort and production quality.
Cognizant Mobility accompanies HOLON through the entire design and architecture development of the mover in the area of electrical/electronics and connected car, providing everything needed for a modern, future-oriented E/E architecture, including functional safety (ISO 26262), cyber security, diagnostics, connectivity, safety of the intended functionality (SOTIF) and Ethernet network design. The self-driving system (SAE Level 4) of the mover is based on the intelligent interaction of various sensor technologies such as three-dimensional laser scanning (Light Detection and Ranging / LiDAR) or radar and camera systems – the technology for this is supplied by the company Mobileye, while the vehicle design comes from the renowned Italian design company Pininfarina. HOLON is also relying on partnerships for the operation of the vehicle: In the USA, the mobility provider Beep is involved in initial pilot projects and, among other things, contributes services for the use and operating systems of the mobility service.
Areas of application for the mover are on-demand services such as ride-pooling and ride-hailing, but also common liner services. The first pilot project has already been announced: In Germany it is being used by Hamburger Hochbahn, the country's second-largest public transport company. Production of the People Mover is expected to begin in the US at the end of 2025. The particularly flexible platform architecture enables HOLON to bring further variants to market in a timely manner – both for passenger transport and freight applications.
Development "From scratch"
The calls of consumers and end customers for an innovative, new form of mobility are getting louder and louder. The lack of legacy processes, tools and products gives a lot of freedom for design, but at the same time becomes one of the biggest challenges in development.
Challenges: autonomous & digital
As an electric, autonomous mover, the degree of networking of the vehicle is extremely high and the complexity of the architecture, which must map all communication, is also big. The step from highly automated driving (Level 3) to fully automated driving (Level 4) – here the vehicle controls complete journeys predominantly independently – is also enormous. When driving at level 4, the vehicle is able to drive fully automatically without human control. A person in the vehicle or an external technical supervisor is asked to take control at the end of the autonomous mode – the architecture of the vehicle must therefore cover all necessary use cases of a Level 4 autonomous vehicle.
Our answer: the Cognizant Mobility Architecture Design Framework
Cognizant Mobility specialists have succeeded in building an end-to-end electrical/electronic architecture, starting with customer features and requirements, through logical functional architecture to physical architecture. A key to the success and rapid realization of the desired vehicle characteristics lies in the further development and application of the Cognizant Mobility Architecture Design Framework. Similar to a modular system, this generates fast results for the customer in the development process and ensures the reusability of the developed functions. Best practices and the mindset brought by Cognizant Mobility also made it possible to create a production-ready vehicle electrical/electronic architecture in such a short time.
The reuse of certain assets generated and refined in previous vehicle programs is an important component in the overall project, including customer features, architectural modeling guidelines and models, requirements, big pictures, workflows, generic schedules or templates for the development tool Vector PreeVision. Reusing assets/artifacts helps speed up the design process.
Traceability in particular is another crucial feature and answers the following questions in the development process: Are all customer features implemented in the tool? Are all requirements mapped to functions or components? Have all our functions been mapped to components? Traceability also offers the vehicle manufacturer a high monetary added value, because it avoids problems with subsequent system integration, reduces the effort and thus also shortens the development time.
Today, cyber security by design is still a discipline that has received too little attention but is becoming increasingly important for all vehicle projects. For the autonomous HOLON Mover, emphasis was therefore placed on a powerful cyber security concept right from the start of the project and the development of the system architecture. Cognizant Mobility's best practices included the safety standards required by the current UNECE R155 and ISO21434 standards and over-the-air end-of-life update capability.
Lessons learned and best practices are also documented and integrated into each new project, allowing the client and Cognizant Mobility team to avoid potential problems and effectively move forward to the next project.
Cognizant Mobility as a Partner
Cognizant Mobility has expertise in all the disciplines necessary for complete vehicle development at the highest level: an agile mindset, benchmarking, E/E architecture development and system integration to test and supplier management.
Using Cognizant Mobility's architecture design framework, best practices and experience, HOLON was able to complete the feasibility and concept phases, design a technical vehicle concept based on planned customer features and requirements, and establish effective communication with potential Tier 1 suppliers, customers and partners.
“We knew from the very first workshop that Cognizant Mobility is the right partner for us. You bring exactly the technical knowhow and experience we need. But the key for our successful collaboration is the spirit, mindset, proactivity, flexibility, foresight, and motivation, we had never seen this with other partners before”, HOLON Project Management