Industry Leaders Discuss Deterministic Ethernet – Connecting Autonomous Driving to Industrial IoT


TTTech is proud to have hosted a cross-industry discussion panel at the Internet of Things (IoT) World Forum in Chicago. The event brought together thought leaders from Audi, BMW, Cisco, Rockwell Automation and Vestas to discuss "Deterministic Ethernet – Connecting Autonomous Driving to Industrial IoT". The panel discussion hosted by Georg Kopetz, co-founder and member of TTTech’s executive board, was focused on the innovations happening in automotive and industrial IoT and in particular on how industrial IoT can benefit from the large investments and scale from the automotive industry, using Deterministic Ethernet as a case example.


Here's a quick summary of what the experts had to say:


Mathias Halliger, Chief Architect at Audi, "Within the development of our highly integrated zFAS platform ECU for piloted driving, Deterministic Ethernet enables the building of a safety-critical system by connecting its functional system subcomponents. Furthermore, high-speed Ethernet networks will allow us to design a future-proof system architecture by updating its embedded database over-the-air."


Kirsten Matheus, Ethernet Project Manager at BMW, "High-bandwith, high data rate, redundancy as well as tight loop-control are essential for autonomous driving." These are all inherent features of Deterministic Ethernet. 


Sujeet Chand, Senior Vice President and CTO of Rockwell Automation, "By transferring automotive technology to the industrial domain we benefit from the scale in automotive leading to cost savings. We are looking forward to the evolving of standards in connection to Deterministic Ethernet." 


Jorge Magalhaes, Senior Vice President of Engineering at Vestas Wind Systems, "Wind turbines need to continue to be even more economical. Therefore reliability and up-time have to be improved, maintenance costs have to be reduced and performance as well as the optimization of the turbine control have to be increased. Deterministic Ethernet gives us more leverage to do that."


Maciej Kranz, Vice President at Cisco Corporate Technology Group, "Deterministic Ethernet is another step in the evolution of Ethernet. The IoT requires more real-time traffic, bigger scale as well as new security and business paradigms. Deterministic Ethernet helps us address these topics."