[sdv-wg] Proposal for an AI Special Interest Group

[John Stenlake <John.Stenlake@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello SDV working group members,

For some weeks now I have been discussing the idea of forming an AI SIG and socialising this with some of you – it was presented as a high level proposal at the Community Meetup in Detroit.  I’d like to formally propose the SIG at this stage and for information this will be presented to the Steering Committee next Monday.  There’s a powerpoint attached with further exposition / thinking on the proposal – none of this is cast in stone however. 

Background:

The automotive industry is experiencing rapid transformation through generative AI adoption - and in particular agentic architectures - both within the vehicle software payload and the development process itself.  Given the broad potential for AI to materially change multiple aspects of the scope of Eclipse SDV, coordination will help us make the most of these changes, and provide guidance to Eclipse SDV projects and the broader automotive ecosystem, as well as coordinating with other interested communities and programs.

Scope:

It’s clear that there are multiple aspects of AI penetration into automotive software, including toolchains, driver assistants, AD/ADAS, AI-derived algorithms etc. – however we propose to focus this SIG initially on AI accelerated and integrated toolchains.  There is a lot of interest and activity in this area, and I would suggest need.  However for this to be optimized, establishing some common semantics and patterns would help facilitate this activity at an industry level.  My hope would be that this will help to address real-world needs, especially to support the integration of S-CORE with heterogenous OEM toolchains in use today.

Proposed Initial Goals:

• Promote adoption of existing Model Context Protocol (MCP) and Agent-to-Agent (A2A) standards in automotive tooling
• Define service capability recommendations for different automotive development tool categories to enable AI-driven integration
• Develop template MCP and A2A service implementations for tool vendors to adopt
• Establish recommended tool selection criteria for OEMs and Tier1s based on AI agent integration capabilities
• Foster ecosystem adoption through reference implementations and best practice guidance
• Build a reference implementation – potentially leveraging the blueprints process, and possible reuse of the former toolchain metamodel.

Collaboration

It is recommended that to maximize efficiency, resources, and alignment, that the group collaborates with other community activity in the same space including:

- Covesa 'Birds of a Feather' Group on Gen AI

- digital.auto AI-enabled toolchain project

- EU funded initiatives as appropriate.

Other projects may be identified and added to this list as the group commences

Expressions of Interest

Interest was expressed during the Community Meetup by members from ETAS, AVL, Accenture, and Microsoft.

With regard to the proposed cooperation with COVESA – the Microsoft representative to COVESA and I have recognized that there appears to be similar interest in both communities.  In order to avoid the complexity and confusion of parallel, competing efforts, we are proposing working collaboratively.  Since both COVESA via their ‘Birds of a Feather’ structure and Eclipse SIGs allow open participation, we believe we have a framework by which a common group of folks can progress both community efforts.  If at some stage it makes sense to separate or partition work, this can always be decided at the time. 

I invite and welcome other Eclipse SDV Working Group members willing to participate in such a SIG to state their intent by replying to this email.  Thank you!

Best wishes,

John Stenlake

Director, AI & SDV Solutions
Microsoft Corporation

 

 

Attachment: Eclipse SDV AI SIG proposal.pdf
Description: Eclipse SDV AI SIG proposal.pdf