Members of the MOBI VID I and II, EVGI, CMDM, FSSC, SC, and UBMI working groups formed the DRIVES Program in April 2021 to ideate, incubate, and demonstrate multiparty applications using MOBI’s Web3 Digital Infrastructure (Citopia and the Integrated Trust Network).

With electric vehicle (EV) sales skyrocketing in recent years, many EV owners are seeking integrated, user-friendly ways to manage and maintain their vehicles and interact with EV charging infrastructure while preserving data privacy for both vehicle and infrastructure owners.

To this end, MOBI and our members developed a pilot to demonstrate on Citopia using ITN as the trust anchor. The user journey involves EV drivers searching for charging stations along their route, making reservations, tracking charging progress, and paying via Citopia. Citopia is designed to facilitate easier EV charging overall and make the booking-payment process as seamless as possible while giving the EV owner access to battery state of health (SOH) and state of charge (SOC) data.

Citopia leverages MOBI Standards, along with standards from W3C, ISO, IEEE, SAE, and Zero Knowledge Proof cryptography to demonstrate seamless booking, management, and payment for EV charging as well as user tracking of battery SOH and SOC via MOBI Trusted Trip Verifiable Credentials (VCs). Trusted identity and assurance services are provided by the ITN.

The battery’s SOH and SOC is determined by its usage and charging history. This information, along with other pertinent static and real-time data, is stored on the battery’s Self-Sovereign Digital Twin™ (SSDT™). Read MOBI’s SOH White Paper here.

All transactions go through the SSDTs™ of the stakeholders by issuing VCs with embedded DIDs (digital signatures) for future verifications. Read more about Citopia and how it works here. The pilot aimed to demonstrate that these transactions could be executed while preserving data privacy, such that the EV owner has control over their trip and battery data and the service providers have control over their business data.

Citopia and the Integrated Trust Network (ITN) form the necessary Web3 infrastructure for these and others usage-based transactions. The ITN is a DIDs registry and public communication channel providing trusted identity services while Citopia, a private communication channel, enables the onboarding of ecosystem stakeholders’ SSDTs™ and issuance of VCs. Together, Citopia and the ITN facilitate countless privacy-preserving multiparty track-and-trace applications for connected mobility and IoT commerce.

Though the trip planning segment in this demo only focuses on searching for in-route charging points, trip planning also includes additional features such as Road Usage Charge, EV Credits/Rewards, and Usage-Based Insurance that can be integrated by service providers using open APIs. This allows providers to connect directly with users during trip planning, reservations, and payment while eliminating the need for centralized platforms. The use of two communication channels, SSDTs, VCs, and DIDs prevent data correlation. Citopia and ITN are separated for decentralization, no one entity has all the information to put the pieces of the puzzle together.

The pilot was successfully demonstrated in October 2021, illustrating the respective capabilities of MOBI Trusted Trip VCs to verify the beginning and ending of charging trips and other VCs to enable the agreements between users and service providers such as booking, payment, etc.

The pilot also showed that user Personally Identifiable Information (PII) was maintained with only the minimal information being processed by Citopia to enable certain functionalities. PII was stored only in user’s SSDTs™ on their personal devices, which Citopia and service providers do not have access to unless given permission. The EVGI working group is currently exploring P2P use cases for the second release of Citopia for EVs.

The EVGI Working Group is chaired by Honda and GM with support from Accenture, AWS, Cognizant, CPChain, DENSO, DOVU, Hitachi, IBM, IOTA, KAR Auction Services, KoinEarth, PG&E, Politecnico di Torino, R3, Spherity, and Swedish Blockchain Association. EVGI II is co-led by Accenture, Anritsu, ASJade, AWS, DENSO, Ford, Henshin Group, Hitachi, Honda, ITOCHU, peaq, and Stellantis.