Introduction
The infrastructure of “GAIA-X 4 moveID” is being designed as a foundation for novel digital business models around future mobility use cases. Such use cases include, e.g., “smart zoning”, i.e., pop-up traffic zones with restricted access, which is communicated and enforced in a fully digital manner. Another example, the “smart car factory”, would receive, collect, and analyze live data feeds from the sensors of car components – to help to learn how to improve components and the factory.
To realize the envisioned use cases, “GAIA-X moveID” develops a decentralized software infrastructure for communication and commercial transactions among cars, vehicles, traffic infrastructure, factories, and service providers. Decentralized principles are being adopted from Web3, with the aim of allowing peer-to-peer transactions (e.g., between cars or cars and service providers) while ensuring data sovereignty.
More on the hardware side, communication of vehicles will be based on existing radio-based Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) technology.
To enable commercial transactions and payments, vehicles, traffic infrastructure, and organizations require digital identities and trust anchors. Self-sovereign identities (SSI) will enable the decentralized management of credentials in combination with individual wallets, ensuring a high level of privacy. “GAIA-X moveID” builds on the services for federated data spaces of its GAIA-X mother project, which already adopts SSI as the basis of the Gaia-X Trust Framework.
A major challenge for the design and realization of the communication infrastructure is the fact that many vehicles can be regarded as edge devices with limitations in their access to the Internet. Therefore, “GAIA-X moveID” acknowledges these limitations in the design of its infrastructure.
Component Landscape
With this article, the first iteration towards a system architecture of the infrastructure is released by means of a comprehensive overview of all components. This overview was created by a group of the project’s software architects in a workshop series end of 2022. The “component landscape” will be validated, detailed, and iterated over the course of the project toward a full-fledged system architecture.
Figure 1 displays the major components and sub-components, organized in three layers: (1) external base infrastructures and services, (2) ecosystem capabilities, and (3) applications and services.
External Base Infrastructure
The external base infrastructure integrates foremost the GAIA-X Trust Framework and other basic GAIA-X services. Furthermore, already existing SSI networks such as IDunion, peaq network or cheqd are aimed to be integrated.
A major objective is interoperability for digital self-sovereign identities and credentials issued by different issuers, possibly in differing formats, and hosted on different networks. Also, blockchain networks will be integrated, e.g., for the settlement of transactions and to enable Federation Services for the data space without a single point of failure or control as described in the following ecosystem capabilities layer.
Ecosystem Capabilities Layer
The ecosystem capabilities layer consists of the core components to be developed and provisioned by the “GAIA-X 4 moveID”-consortium. This layer builds on lower-level base infrastructure and services. The layer is structured into four main building blocks: (1) services and data handling, (2) access control, (3) commercial handling and contracting services, and (4) monitoring & governance.
The services and data handling block provides capabilities for discovering services, exchanging, and distributing data over the cloud or edge among users, and self-descriptions of actors and organizations.
The access control block takes care of cloud and edge-based access management and control using various policies and modules to control, inform about, register, and enforce policies. Cloud backend, edge, and user frontend components will be able to authenticate via different modules and can orchestrate data processing in a privacy-preserving manner with Compute-to-Data.
Commercial handling consists of modules for trading data and services around mobility in the smart city and beyond, booking and contracting related to these services, and financial services such as payments, accounting, etc.
The monitoring & governance block consists of modules for monitoring, controlling, and governing the “GAIA-X 4 moveID” ecosystem.
Furthermore, an additional base component of the ecosystem capabilities layer provides digital identity management capabilities. These capabilities are supposed to be based on W3C’s SSI standards, identity management functionalities of GAIA-X, and an exchange logic for credentials and decentralized identifiers.
Applications & Services
The top layer foresees the realizations of the use case applications and services, leveraging on “GAIA-X 4 moveID”’s ecosystem capabilities. These capabilities will be provided by software development kits, software libraries, and service containers.
Next Steps
With the publication of the component landscape, the members of the “GAIA-X 4 moveID”-consortium look forward to discussions and feedback. We are especially interested in early adopters, who would like to integrate into the designed infrastructure and in driving forward a thriving future mobility ecosystem.
The project consortium has planned to further evolve the component landscape over the course of the project and design more detailed views and remaining pieces of a system architecture.
A first realization of parts of the shown component landscape is planned within the scope of a real-world demonstrator around a parking use case. The consortium plans to show this demonstrator during a series of Gaia-X events and the IAA MOBILITY international motor show in Munich, from 5th to 10th September 2023.
About
The SSI-based V2X infrastructure for a future mobility ecosystem is developed by a subproject of “GAIA-X moveID”, headed by Bosch in cooperation with Atos, Chainstep, Denso, Fetch.ai, htw saar, Ocean Protocol, deltaDAO, peaq, 51nodes, Datarella, Zeppelin University, and ecsec.
For more information regarding the component landscape, feel free to contact Dr. Achim Klein.
The “GAIA-X 4 moveID” project is part of the “GAIA-X 4 Future Mobility” project family.
The project was started in July 2022 and is fiscally supported by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action over a three-year period.
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