IoT and AI increase Volvo Vans car connectivity

The autos manufactured by Volvo Vans hold getting smarter.

Greater than 350,000 Volvo rigs crossing North American highways every day are outfitted with IoT sensors that monitor circumstances and ship knowledge for troubleshooting and evaluation. Embedded telematics enable for over-the-air updates to engine software program. The on-board know-how, mixed with a back-end analytics platform, allows Volvo Vans to course of hundreds of thousands of information information instantaneously. Utilizing IoT and synthetic intelligence, Volvo Vans has been in a position to scale back diagnostic time by 70% and truck restore time by 25%. 

For fleet managers, the most important profit is improved uptime. “With simpler and proactive upkeep, Volvo Vans may help prospects maximize autos’ time on the highway and reduce the prices of service disruptions,” says Conal Deedy, director of buyer productiveness options at Volvo Vans North America, which is a part of Swedish multinational manufacturing firm Volvo Group.

Volvo Vans’ car connectivity capabilities are eight years within the making. Its preliminary foray into related vehicles started in 2012, when it developed a distant diagnostics service that enables prospects to transmit info to and from their vehicles and monitor mechanical fault codes in real-time. Shortly after launching its diagnostics service, Volvo Vans unveiled a distant programming service that enables for over-the-air software program and parameter updates through mobile service.

Fault codes are triggered when one thing goes improper with one in every of a car’s main methods, such because the engine or transmission. Sensors on every truck acquire streaming IoT knowledge in actual time to supply context. This knowledge contains the place a mechanical occasion occurred and what circumstances have been current through the fault, similar to altitude, ambient air temperature, RPM degree, and torque load. The purpose is to supply sooner, extra complete diagnostics and repairs than conventional “set-mileage scheduled” service appointments, whereas on the similar time giving fleet operators details about driving habits, gas consumption, truck efficiency, and different elements.

Over the previous few years, Volvo Vans has targeted on enhancing and increasing its analytics capabilities. It partnered with analytics vendor SAS to deploy a extra superior platform that leverages occasion stream processing and AI. “The SAS analytics platform offers Volvo Vans a option to outline advanced guidelines to enhance how its distant diagnostics circumstances are created and acted upon,” Deedy says.

The place the info goes

Every Volvo truck in North America that is geared up with distant diagnostics has lots of of sensors, about 75 of that are monitored intently as a result of the analytics have decided that these sensors present helpful info on crucial failures. The vehicles ship the info to a telematics communication gateway, utilizing an over-the-air mobile community.

The proprietary gateway “is designed to entry the core knowledge networks throughout the vehicles with a view to reliably acquire and retailer knowledge with out interfering with truck operations,” Deedy says. Key knowledge is transmitted on to Volvo Vans’ devoted servers, which translate the data for additional processing.

Any knowledge that signifies a mechanical fault is shipped in close to actual time to an inbound message queue, the place it’s picked up and processed by the SAS Occasion Stream Processing engine over a 10Gb community.

The SAS system applies analytical-based guidelines and might set off the creation of assist circumstances through an outbound message queue. Volvo Vans’ ASIST system, a Net-based service administration platform, picks up messages from the outbound message queue to course of buyer notifications.

“The principles engine analyzes and applies advanced enterprise guidelines to streaming fault knowledge in movement,” Deedy says. Clients are then notified of faults by a Volvo Vans Uptime Middle worker through e-mail, textual content, or telephone. “The entire knowledge seize and processing are finished inside Volvo Vans’ firewalls to make sure knowledge safety.”

The system processes 1.5 million fault alerts per day, with every alert containing 30 to lots of of information objects similar to powertrain sensor readings. The occasion stream processing by SAS triggers some 4,000 guidelines every day, together with about 3,000 up to date circumstances and 1,000 new circumstances.

One other part of the system, SAS Asset Efficiency Analytics, is an analytics engine Volvo Vans makes use of to look at historic fault knowledge. Managers can use the evaluation capabilities to refine parameters within the guidelines engine, carry out knowledge alternatives, and report on historic fault knowledge.

The analytics engine shops eight terabytes of information and holds historic fault knowledge from 2015 by way of the current. These faults, now totaling about 1 billion, have been generated from a rising fleet of related vehicles—presently 350,000—over that point interval. One and a half million faults are added to the analytics engine every day.

The SAS platform, which took about 11 months to deploy due to the complexity of the operation, is constructed on a cluster of high-performance servers that use in-memory applied sciences and low-latency/high-throughput solid-state drives.

The AI capabilities have enabled Volvo Vans to uncover hidden insights within the collected knowledge and merge it with the truck information of its engineering group. That places the corporate in a a lot better place to know precisely what the info is saying and combine it into the distant diagnostics service. The SAS analytics deployment has reduce down considerably on false positives and improved Volvo Vans’ diagnostic accuracy.

Challenges/advantages of auto connectivity

Volvo Vans needed to overcome some challenges to execute its connectivity technique. One hurdle was making certain seamless collaboration amongst a number of events, together with Volvo Vans; HCL Applied sciences, an IT companies supplier that acquired Volvo’s exterior IT enterprise in 2016; SAS; and HPE, whose {hardware} is used to run the SAS software program. Volvo Vans took a “one group” method and recognized key assets from every get together to work collectively on main developments.

One of many greatest technical points was integrating SAS rules-processing applied sciences into current Volvo Vans’ processes and methods. The telematics infrastructure and ASIST system have been already constructed and confirmed entities at Volvo Vans. Modification of those methods required that the SAS know-how plug in seamlessly with these methods. To make it occur, Volvo Vans created detailed necessities for gathering knowledge and relied on the flexibleness of SAS occasion stream processing to combine with its inside methods. It labored intently with SAS skilled companies and R&D groups to deal with implementation of the advanced guidelines.

For reliability, Volvo Vans opted to make use of the failover capabilities of the SAS analytics engine and combine it with Apache Kafka, an open-source stream-processing software program platform. A standby server will course of knowledge if the first occasion stream processing server goes offline. Information is saved in Apache Kafka for an outlined retention interval, in order that if each servers go offline, the servers can reprocess time-based guidelines and catch up upon restart.

Advancing the technique

Volvo Vans continues to push ahead on its connectivity technique. The corporate just lately unveiled its Dynamic Upkeep service, created with IoT vendor associate Noregon. The service makes use of current related applied sciences and knowledge analytics, mixed with Noregon’s platform, to supply personalized service plans right down to the person car degree to enhance fleet operations effectivity.

One other new service is Geotab Drive for Volvo Vans, an digital logging system (ELD) developed with telematics and IoT firm Geotab that gives prospects with a instrument to watch and file driving logs, similar to car inspection studies. The important thing profit is the power to ship correct logs in compliance with the ELD mandate of Federal Motor Provider Security Administration (FMCSA) laws.

Volvo’s factory-fit telematics system works together with Geotab’s ELD cloud-based utility to supply knowledge seize and supply. Fleet managers can entry ELD knowledge by way of a MyGeotab portal, to allow them to hold monitor of fleet compliance with real-time knowledge, with the power to view detailed studies on driver logs, violation alerts, and operating studies on the standing of a fleet.

Most ELDs ship knowledge by way of Wi-Fi or Bluetooth-based methods, Volvo Vans says, however Geotab Drive operates over a cloud-based system that it says gives prospects with extra dependable ELD data-capture capabilities.

Volvo Vans additionally launched the Parameter Plus subscription bundle, a complement to its distant programming service. The bundle leverages the corporate’s embedded telematics and permits fleet managers to do extra over-the-air updates to engine parameters and software program through mobile networks, which cuts down on interruptions to driving schedules. The bundle was designed based mostly on suggestions from prospects. Beforehand, parameter and software program updates might require two or extra days of downtime together with added work and prices. With the brand new service, powertrain software program updates might be accomplished in lower than 20 minutes.

“All of those efforts are designed to make the corporate a frontrunner in industrial car connectivity,” Deedy says.