SOAFEE Roundtable Introduces Blueprints for Automotive Innovation
October 29, 2025
Video
The SOAFEE community is charting its vision for the future of automotive software.
Following my previous discussion with Robert Day and John Penn about the history of SOAFEE and the purpose of the SOAFEE Blueprint initiative, this roundtable discussion brings together the Autoware Foundation, DENSO, LG Electronics, and Panasonic Automotive to discuss how these blueprints are shaping the software-defined vehicle (SDV) landscape today.
Moderated by Tobias McBride, SOAFEE’s Blueprint and Member Manager, the conversation reveals how each member’s blueprint is not just a concept but a live experiment. Each one is designed to demonstrate what works, validate architectural principles, and accelerate the industry’s shift toward open, cloud-native automotive development.
Why Blueprints Matter
Tobias McBride opens the discussion by explaining that SOAFEE’s Blueprints are “where companies collaborate to solve some of the most varied problems in automotive software. Everything from autonomy to orchestration to determinism to virtualization – and so much more.”
“These are real examples, workloads, and technologies solving real-world problems,” he said, adding that blueprints are “technical validation and more importantly, education.” Once a Blueprint’s approach is proven, then the Blueprint becomes the standard.
That collaborative mindset is what drew many members into SOAFEE, DENSO’s Ravi Akella explained.
“In our view, the SDV technology landscape is too broad, complex, and it’s rapidly evolving. The traditional automaker would have to invest a lot of resources and time to embrace this transformation. An industry-led open collaboration will greatly minimize the time for maturing the technology in a moderated way and promotes interdisciplinary dialogue, which is very essential for the development and realization of SDV.”
Blueprints in Motion
Autoware Foundation: OpenADKit
Christian “CJ” John, President of Tier IV North America and board member of the Autoware Foundation introduces OpenADKit as “a full-stack autonomous driving solution. He explained, “Our Blueprint, what we’re looking to do is to enable an open autonomous driving software stack on the SOAFEE architecture, leveraging the capabilities of SOAFEE to do things like mixed-critical orchestration, which is very relevant for a safety-critical application such as autonomous driving.”
CJ described how Autoware’s workloads, including perception, prediction, and path planning all map nicely into the SOAFEE architecture through containerization. He also emphasized the value of collaborating, stating, “The SOAFEE ecosystem has really enabled us to bring all those partner together to do that.”
LG Electronics: PICCOLO
Chulhee Lee, project leader of LG Electronics’ PICCOLO Blueprint, explained that PICCOLO is a project dedicated to enabling mixed-critical orchestration in software-defined vehicles.
He said that orchestration involves coordinating software components and workloads, determining where they run, how resources are allocated, and how services remain operational during updates or failures. In automotive systems, PICCOLO addresses the challenges of isolated domains by introducing a lightweight, Rust-based, context-aware orchestration layer.
“It enables flexible service orchestration across domains and faster scaling of new features and turning the car into a dynamic service platform rather than a set of isolated functionality,” Lee said.
He added that PICCOLO has been integrated into SOAFEE’s EWOAL platform to enable flexible service orchestration across domains and faster scaling of new features while maintaining safety and deterministic behavior.
DENSO: Determinism Through Lingua Franca
DENSO’s Ravi Akella described determinism as key to reliability in software-defined systems:
“Determinism, in short, allows you to achieve precise and consistent application behavior across different runs and execution environments. This is important, particularly to SDVs, because the software developed in a cloud-native environment should have functionally safe real-time behavior when deployed to a real vehicle.”
Through its first SOAFEE blueprint, DENSE is using Lingua Franca to synchronize workloads and enforce precise event scheduling that fully leverages the capabilities of the underlying hardware. Akella noted that a second SOAFEE Blueprint, planned for release toward the end of the year, will focus on real-time coordination between application workloads running on the high-performance compute domain and the safety island.
Panasonic Automotive: Virtualization and Unified HMI
Panasonic Automotive’s Chief SDV Architect Jerry Zhao presented two Blueprints currently in development — vSkipGen and Unified HMI — both built on the VirtIO virtualization framework.
“The first blueprint, vSkipGen, is a cloud-based platform tailored for the automotive software developers and testers. This innovative solution allows users to run individual virtual machines in the cloud, supporting various automotive operating systems like Linux, AGL, and Android.
“The second blueprint, Unified HMI, is a virtual display framework based on and extended from the virtual GPU. It allows you to control the HMI applications across the different operating system displays and ECU. You can imagine that all displays in the vehicles can be treated as one big virtual display, and you can put your application anywhere.”
Zhao also noted that Unified HMI has already been open-soured, and support for Android is currently in development.
Regional Momentum: SOAFEE APAC Hub
Zhao also serves as chair of the SOAFEE APAC Regional Hub, which connects local and global members. Nearly 40 percent of SOAFEE’s member companies are based in the APAC region, and the hub works to strengthen collaboration by linking the region with the global SOAFEE community. It shares global initiatives with APAC members while bringing their ideas and real-world challenges back to the broader organization.
Looking Ahead to the AI-Defined Vehicle
As the discussion wrapped up, participants converged on a common focus: integrating AI into SDVs safely, securely, and transparently. Chuhlee Lee highlighted that the next five years will test how the industry orchestrates, updates, and validates AI workflows without compromising safety or reliability. Ravi Akella pointed to public trust as the key barrier, emphasizing that the industry must demonstrate clear guarantees of safety, privacy, and security to ear user confidence.
“CJ” John underscored the technical challenge ahead, noting that future platforms will need to be developed and verified virtually in the cloud to accelerate software and hardware integration. Jerry Zhao concluded by bringing the conversation back to collaboration, calling connection “the next big challenge” – linking ecosystems, regions, companies, and people to advance the future of mobility together.
Blueprints as the Scaffolding of Tomorrow’s Mobility
Tobias McBride closed the session with a clear message: “Blueprints aren’t just technical demos. They’re the real building blocks, the scaffolding of a new era in software and automotive. And the more companies that do it, the stronger that scaffolding, the stronger those building blocks are going to get.”
For engineers and developers, the SOAFEE Blueprints represent an open invitation to collaborate and experiment. To learn more about the published SOAFEE Blueprints and to learn about those coming soon, visit SOAFEE in Action.
