ISO 17978-3:2026

Road vehicles — Service-oriented vehicle diagnostics (SOVD) — Part 3: Application programming interface (API)

Scope

This document defines an application programming interface (API) which standardizes the methods for diagnosing HPCs and legacy ECUs, the retrieval of the diagnostic capabilities, and the discovery of the service-oriented vehicle diagnostics (SOVD) methods in an extended vehicle. The SOVD API provides a unified access to classic ECUs and HPCs.
The SOVD API provides functions such as:

access to the faults, including reading the fault entries, reading environment data, and deleting fault entries;
measurements and identifications of all entities;
execution of routines, input/output (I/O) controls and software functions in certain modes or states;
configuration of a vehicle (e.g. equipment, country, customer demand, variant coding);
encapsulation of the ExVe manufacturer specific software update strategy (including firmware over the air (FOTA) if available);
access to logging information of an HPC.

With these features, SOVD can cover all areas of the vehicle life cycle, including engineering (development), manufacturing (production), after sales (maintenance and repair), legal and technical inspections and vehicle operation (use).
There are several aspects which are not covered by this document, as they are specific to the implementation of an SOVD server, for example:

prevention and quick reaction to attack vectors like denial of service, zero-day exploits of vulnerabilities;
recognition of security incidents;
maintaining the operational safety based on data monitoring;
management of security incidents;
data privacy issues;
load balancing of concurrent requests.