moveID’s Target Vision for an Open Digital Identity Infrastructure for Vehicles and Mobility Services in the Smart City

The technical target vision of the GAIA-X 4 moveID project presented in this article, describes what the project aims to achieve, and which elements of the vision are in the scope. This early-stage vision might be subject to adaptation throughout the development of the project.

Objective

The objective of the digital infrastructure that is developed in moveID is:

Building an interoperable and open digital infrastructure for mobile identities of all smart city participants to enable economic transactions and foster the emergence of an ecosystem for digital mobility services.

The infrastructure should allow the peer-to-peer connection of identities (of vehicles, smart city entities, organizations, and users) and allow transactions with different payloads, e.g., sensor data, and also monetary transactions for paying (mobility) service providers.

Following the network layer model, on top of transaction capabilities, applications will be defined in the use cases. The tech stack to build the infrastructure starts with basic GAIA-X services (e.g., for identity and trust) on the lower end, uses hardware (in vehicles and traffic infrastructure), V2X-based communication capabilities to allow interaction between digital identities. Enabling trust between identities is important and reputation systems might play a role here. Single points of failure should be avoided.

Technical Target Vision

The following figure depicts moveID’s technical vision of an SSI-based interoperable digital identity infrastructure for all participants of the mobile smart city.

Major components of moveID’s technical target vision are:

(1) Vehicles. That is single vehicles, and fleets of vehicles. Vehicles are manufactured by a car company and with OEM parts. All vehicles and manufacturers are equipped with an SSI-based digital identity. Vehicles can communicate using their identities and V2X means with each other and with the elements of the smart city infrastructure. Real cars with real cameras should be part of the demonstration of the target vision.

As a concretization of the smart vehicle, elements of the logistics chain should be considered such as trucks, forklifts, AGVs (automated guided vehicle – driverless transport vehicle) or other assets of extra and intra logistics.

(2) Smart city infrastructure, including Zones, Charging stations, Parking gates, Traffic lights, Service stations, Toll stations, and Fleet management. The smart factory can be also seen as part of the smart city including logistic entities (trucks, warehouses, AGVs, production lines). The infrastructure is equipped with V2X-means to communicate with vehicles. Furthermore, infrastructure elements and operating organizations are equipped with SSI-based digital identities.

(3) Interaction and transaction. The data exchange and the corresponding transactions among smart city participants can be monetary, but can also include the exchange of other payloads such as freight data, etc.

(4) Users follow a user journey (allowing easy onramp, onboarding, switching, and usage) and they are represented and supported by software agents. Agents can act on behalf of a user in interactions with other entities in the smart city. Agents would follow objectives and rules imposed by the user.

(5) Initial use cases for the moveID infrastructure are defined around the topics smart parking (such as automatic authorization and payments) and smart zoning, as well as based on data collection from automobile parts to route back to the smart factory to learn from the field data. The smart factory can be seen as a component of the smart city.