GAIA-X for the mobility of the future

"A holistic, transparent system architecture for the exchange of data in road traffic is not available today. There are individual companies that already offer services. But these services are tailored to specific applications, vehicles or customer groups," explains Peter Busch, project manager of consortium leader Bosch for the GAIA-X 4 moveID research project. The infrastructure, for example, is often mapped, but information on the availability of services is rarely available due to the lack of networking between the many independently operating providers. With GAIA-X 4 moveID, universities, automotive suppliers and system providers will therefore jointly develop the necessary standards and technological concepts for a secure exchange of information between vehicles and their environment, between providers and customers of mobility applications over the next three years under the leadership of Bosch. The goal: decentralised digital vehicle identities. This will become an important prerequisite for the mass operation of electric vehicles, automated driving and the development of networked cities.

The project participants include the companies Denso and Continental, WOBCOM, the aerospace and defence company Airbus and various research institutions. GAIA-X 4 moveID is embedded in the larger European initiative GAIA-X to build a cross-industry, networked and shared data infrastructure in Europe. GAIA-X follows European data protection principles and relies on a decentralised architecture and transparency. Contributions to this are being made throughout Europe. GAIA-X sets priorities in various application domains, such as mobility. This is where the GAIA-X 4 Future Mobility project family is anchored, which also includes the GAIA-X moveID project.

GAIA-X 4 Future Mobility is coordinated by the Institute for AI Security at the German Aerospace Center (DLR) and provides the framework for five projects so far, bringing together around 80 partners from industry and science whose focus is on the development of data-centric applications where close networking of users, service providers, manufacturers and suppliers is particularly important. The individual projects focus, among other things, on intelligent transport infrastructure, the product life cycle or digital twins in connection with automated driving. The Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Protection is funding GAIA-X 4 moveID with 14 million euros, thus covering half of the project costs.

With the standards targeted by GAIA-X 4 moveID, vehicles should be able to exchange information with other vehicles and their surroundings safely and confidently without "intermediaries". The vehicles' "infrastructure partners" include, for example, charging stations, barriers, traffic lights or car parks.

In which car parks are there currently free charging columns? Where are parking spaces still available in the city centre? And how can this information be transmitted digitally and the services billed across providers? The solution to these and similar questions requires a secure exchange of data between the vehicles and their environment. "Open standards are needed, for example, so that users can find all available charging stations or pay for charging processes," explains Peter Busch. It must always be guaranteed that the data is processed securely and not used by individual providers exclusively for their own purposes. Only in this way can the necessary trust of the users grow and a broad range of all available services emerge, such as so-called deep parking (use of otherwise unavailable parking spaces).

For this reason, the consortium is building on the European GAIA-X system, which defines technical, economic and legal foundations for a trustworthy and secure data infrastructure. GAIA-X relies on decentralisation and the interaction of different cloud providers with common guidelines. The GAIA-X 4 moveID project also acts in this spirit. It uses open source for its developments and makes them available to all providers for different business models.

The research project wants to develop management and administrative services for interaction and trade among the actors with the help of internationally recognised hardware and software. Especially in autonomous driving, providers could thus link offers such as news, entertainment, navigation and much more with the car's system. The market for connected parking services alone is estimated at ten billion euros annually worldwide. In addition, the selective targeting of parking facilities is an important contribution to reducing traffic and emissions - the search for a parking space today accounts for around one third of inner-city traffic. The availability of information is also an essential factor for the success of electromobility. In Europe, it is estimated that a good half of newly registered cars will be electrically powered by 2030. "Their users must be able to rely on finding charging options as quickly as possible and in good time. The networking of systems is fundamental to this," says Peter Busch.

Automated driving in mass operation is only conceivable if automobiles communicate quickly and reliably with their surroundings. The data exchange necessary for this enables climate-friendly control of traffic flows based on the current volume. In this way, cities can regulate access to certain areas in real time and avoid traffic jams. However, this so-called zoning requires that vehicles immediately recognise changing conditions and choose new routes accordingly. As part of GAIA-X 4 moveID, zoning is being demonstrated for the first time with test vehicles across borders in the Germany-France-Luxembourg test area (Merzig/Saarbrücken). Cars dynamically receive information on entering defined areas.