BMW and DXC technology, a global end-to-end IT services company, have signed an agreement to support BMW’s autonomous vehicle development via the High-Performance D3 platform. The technology gathers massive amounts of road-travel data from the global BMW test fleet. Using DXC’s digital solution, BMW’s manufacturing research and development teams will be able to collect, store and manage vehicle sensor data in seconds rather than days or weeks, resulting in faster autonomous drive development cycles.

DXC is promoting autonomous driving research and development by expediting engineering and testing cycles. An example of this capability is DXC Robotic Drive, which rapidly accelerates the autonomous driving development process — from data collection, storage and analysis to deployment of evolved knowledge. Built on an open-source ecosystem, DXC Robotic Drive is available on-premise or in a cloud or hybrid environment, allowing workloads to be moved easily. The DXC Robotic Drive platform and toolkit are composed of digital analytics, cloud and platform services, and security and applications offerings. According to DXC, Engineers can work collaboratively and in an agile fashion regardless of their geographic locations. Using a single platform for storage, processing and training means hardware and software requirements, and hence cost and complexity, are reduced. Data can be collected globally but monitored centrally, maximising efficiency and reducing cost.

Alejandro Vukotich, senior vice president, Autonomous Driving and Driver Assistance at BMW Group said, “Autonomous driving is at the heart of BMW Group’s ‘NUMBER ONE > NEXT’ strategy’. DXC will greatly support our commitment to maximizing innovation, which will benefit our customers. With the managed services, we are able to ramp up the solution to support the next stage of the future of BMW Group’s autonomous drive platform.”

Edward Ho, executive vice president and general manager, offerings, DXC Technology, said, “The next five years will be pivotal as technology and partner ecosystems continue to help revolutionize the automotive industry. DXC welcomes the opportunity to collaborate with BMW Group to advance autonomous driving development capabilities. With the platform and tools provided by DXC, BMW engineers are able to significantly accelerate the engineering and testing of autonomous driving algorithms.”