The first ever virtual AEF General Assembly took place on Thursday the 15th of October. The AEF Chairperson, Peter van der Vlugt opened the meeting and gave a summary of the AEF activities over the past 12 months. Then it was Norbert Schlingmann’s turn as the General Manger to provide an update on the progress of the different project teams, including an update on the ATLAS project after its first 12 months of activity. This was followed by the outlook for 2021.

As mentioned above, during this year’s Chair Group (CG) election meeting resulted in a change of the Vice-Chairperson. Marcello Mongiardo as the retiring Vice-Chairperson was succeeded by Andrew Olliver for a new term of 2 years. Both Steering Committee (SC) members are representing Core Member CNHi. During the virtual General Assembly meeting, the Chairperson Peter van der Vlugt thanked Marcello Mongiardo for his 8 years of dedicated contribution and efforts in the CG.

Core Membership changes

At the last AEF General Assembly held October 15, 2020, leadership addressed a change request to the Core membership. The CCI group had requested a change to their representation in the steering committee, due to new duties and responsibilities taken on by the current representative, Jan Horstmann – Krone.

… our new AEF office team member Stefanie Schemmink.

In 2020 the AEF started scheduling a new educational series called Tech Talks on a monthly basis. AEF Tech Talks are short condensed introductions to different topics and in 2020, we received information about the ATLAS project, oneM2M and  Gaia-X a new European initiative about data spaces.

On November the 11th and 12th the AEF had the honour of presenting two sessions during the EIMA Digital Preview (EDP). The EDP was a purely online affair scheduled in the original timeslot (11-15 November) of the EIMA show as the event (the physical show) was rescheduled to 2021.

On 28th of October 2020 the third AEF Service Council took place in Warendorf, Germany. The event – aimed at dealer service and sales staff as well as OEM product support and product management – focused on the AEF ISOBUS Database, ISOBUS related questions and experiences from the participants in 2020.

Project activities for the UT 3 ISOBUS functionality conformance test have received much interest for the past few years. In January 2020 a face to face meeting was held Osnabruck to align the project activities under one project charter and a single project lead. Sven Mindrup, Laboratory Manager at the ISOBUS Test Center in Osnabrück, has accepted role of project lead for the newly aligned UT 3 project to implement a conformance test for the UT 3 functionality and align the AEF Guideline.

A new lead is sought for the AEF Security Expert Team. This is a diverse team made up of security professionals from both OEMs and security consultancies and was set up in 2019 to address the AEF organization’s need for a strategic approach to security. The definition of a strategy for security and the work on a secure AEF business model for the next generation of ISOBUS functionalities, are among the main drivers for the formation of this team.