Traveling

Last year the 10th AOC was in San Jose, this year the 11th was just as far but then in the other direction… in Shanghai

Also a first time, I’ve never been to China before. before we left there was already a bit of bad news: The Hard-Rock cafe in Shanghai just closed. Grrr.

Also acquiring a Visa was a bit troublesome… but I managed in time.

But OK, we had to work anyway. So on Sunday, me and a colleague left for Schiphol Airpor (My Favorite) to fly to Xiamen and then to Shanghai. Almost 16 hours in total. The first flight took 10 1/2 hours, that is long… Somehow I did not manage to sleep so I was pretty tired after arrival.

Luckily the arrival was in the evening so after a shower and a meal we could quickly go to bed. Before that we managed to get some SIM cards so that we could be online in an affordable way. Also we tried an ATM and that worked! China uses

But soon we noticed that not everything is easy in China. Almost everything is blocked, Google, Facebook, Uber, WhatsApp and even Pokémon (Yes, yes….) Even many commercial VPN services don’t work.

Luckily I have my own VPN at home so I could have some communication with the home front. But it is definitely not as easy as we are used to now. And slow. And you get kicked out every now and then.

So if you travel to China:

* buy a SIM card from China Mobile (costs about €20 for a Month unlimited data)

* Optionally take a second cel phone (Or a WiFi 4G Router)

* Organize a VPN

* Download WeChat. Without WeChat you are lost in China. It is their WhatsApp and Facebook and ApplePay.

* If you go to China longer: go to ICBC and organize a Bank Account. You can link that to WeChat and use it to pay. They not always accept you as a customer but just try another one.

* No Uber but China has DiDi, get that!

The Conference

The Conference was 2 days, the first was a technical day with 2 parallel slots, one for Classic and one for Adaptive. My colleague and I decided to split up, I would do the Classic track, he the Adaptive.

It turned out to be the most interesting day, the next day was much more superficially from an information standpoint. At night was the networking reception, that is always very useful.

I changed my opinion about Adaptive AUTOSAR. My usual comment was: “Adaptive is like teenager sex, they all speak about it but nobody know how it works and nobody has done it”. I thought the use would be limited to infotainment and autonomous driving ECUs.

But I noticed that there is a trend towards centralization, like in the IT world. Nota bad idea, you create lots of intelligent sensors and actors and connect them to a powerful system that can control them.

Since most ECU’s are not “stand-alone” anyway but have to share tons of information with other ECU’s it is a good idea to combine all these systems.

Since the “intelligent” sensors and actuators will be still made with Classic AUTOSAR, there must be an AUTOSAR Classic inside the Adaptive.

We also learned a lot of other things like the communication (SOME/IP) and DDS, a systemwide publisher Subscriber (A bit like Da Boston Broker )

Back Home

It was a short visit, on Thursday we went back the same way we came. We got lucky, a free upgrade to Economy Plus. Unfortunately a large family (I think from one of the countries that used to be Yugoslavia) thought it was a good idea to put the entire family in Economy Plus, including their noisy kids. But we returned home safely!

I will be back in Shanghai in 2 weeks for the MESCONF.

That was it

happy modeling with Rhapsody

Walter van der Heiden (wvdheiden@willert.de)