Technology and mobility leaders like DENSO, Ford, and General Motors (GM) join forces with MOBI to co-create industry-wide blockchain-based standards that enable the secure exchange of data for a smarter mobility future

SINGAPORE, March 3, 2021 /PRNewswire/ — What if cars could communicate with each other to avoid imminent crashes and use shared data to prevent future accidents while preserving the drivers’ privacy? What if you could use one app with a single payment platform to securely coordinate and integrate all of your daily commute needs? What if navigation apps need your permission to track your mobility preferences, or better yet, pay you? Mobility is becoming increasingly connected and intelligent, which in turn creates a nearly infinite amount of valuable data that, if shared securely, could save lives and improve mobility ecosystems at every level. Mobility Open Blockchain Initiative (MOBI) members, such as DENSO, Ford, and GM, are among many that teamed up to create standards for permissioning, validating, and sharing data in automation networks for connected mobility.

The MOBI Connected Mobility Data Marketplace (CMDM) Working Group releases standards today to enable a marketplace that could securely commodify mobility data and ensure data privacy for mobility users. The CMDM Standards include core services, logical schemas, and sensor identity/ownership certificates. These three components will enable frictionless data sharing to establish communication and collaboration between the data silos of Mobility Service Providers, while maintaining high standards of data privacy and security for all users.

“This framework gives mobility providers valuable guidance on how we can all work together to make transportation safer, smarter and more efficient,” said Roger Berg, Vice President of North American Research and Development at DENSO. “Sharing data, securely and through common standards, can unlock a vast array of positive mobility outcomes, from accident reduction to privacy protection to improving traffic flow.”  

The Working Group is co-chaired by DENSO and GM, with support from Accenture, AMO Labs, Cognizant, Constellation Network, Continental, CPChain, DMX, Fifth9, Filament, Ford, IBM, NuCypher, Ocean Protocol, RouteOne, ShareRing, Swedish Blockchain Association, and Toyota Insurance Management Solutions (TIMS).

Trust in data, its provenance, and chain of custody are essential for value creation in business ecosystems. Centralized databases, of the type that currently assign identities and rights on the internet, provide an attractive target for malicious actors and make networks vulnerable to attack and fraud, exposing individual and business data. Blockchain emerged as a solution to these issues and is being adopted by ecosystems such as connected mobility in order to securely share data and protect users’ data privacy.

“For connected mobility data to be efficiently shared, there must be a functioning marketplace for discovery, permission, exchange, and pricing,” said MOBI Co-Founder and COO, Tram Vo. “The standards from the MOBI CMDM Working Group lay the foundation for a secure and viable market.”

Maximizing passenger safety and transportation efficiency requires that vehicle-to-anything (V2X) data be shared and processed locally in near real-time at the “edge” of the network. Edge computing has been a large focus for the distributed computing community, and MOBI believes that the widespread growth of connected and autonomous vehicles represents one of the most exciting and impactful opportunities for a data marketplace, providing speed, cost savings, and new revenue opportunities.

The Working Group explored practical use cases that center around vehicle data generation, ensuring data provenance, and securely sharing data with peers (such as other vehicles and infrastructure). These use cases include:

• V2X data exchange 
• Geo-location cross validation
• Multimodal trip planning through easy, interoperable, and secure sharing of data
• Coordination between autonomous vehicles, big data, and edge computing that would increase traffic safety and efficiency

CMDM Standards are the first step to ensure data privacy in data exchange and efficient data marketplaces for mobility ecosystems. The standards do not prescribe governance models, but instead prescribe functionalities that can be applied to many governance models in a decentralized marketplace. All MOBI Standards are intended to be GDPR compliant. We do not prescribe specific aspects of GDPR and other privacy regulations such as California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), which are left up to the application developers. MOBI and its members hope that the CMDM standards, together with other MOBI standards for blockchain applications in mobility, will promote data privacy, reduce frictional inefficiencies, improve mobility services, and enable new business models.

About MOBI
MOBI is a nonprofit alliance of many of the world’s largest vehicle manufacturers, along with startups, NGOs, transit agencies, insurers, toll road providers, smart city leaders, and technology companies working to accelerate adoption and promote standards in blockchain, distributed ledgers, and related technologies.

MOBI is creating simple blockchain-based standards to identify vehicles, people, and businesses in order to securely exchange and monetize data, and pay for mobility services, with the goal of making transportation more efficient, affordable, greener, safer, and less congested.  MOBI itself is technology and ledger agnostic.  For additional information about joining MOBI, please reach out to Griffin Haskins (griffin@dlt.mobi) or visit www.dlt.mobi.

Media Contact:
Kelly Clark, MOBI Communications Manager
Email: Kelly@dlt.mobi | Twitter: @dltMOBI