T-Hive: TICO Center of Expertise for autonomous vehicle software
Our Story
As the demand for industrial autonomous vehicles is increasing, Toyota felt the need to re-think its software designs to achieve the scalability required to capture the opportunity of the growing market.
To solidify software development efforts in TICO’s various group companies, T-Hive was established in 2021 as TICO’s center of expertise on autonomous vehicle software. Our main goal is to develop competitive, global, in-house autonomous vehicle solutions, making effective use of Toyota Group resources. These software solutions are being used by TICO group companies to serve their customers globally.
T-Hive is set up as an extended R&D business unit without direct end-customers. On the contrary, our ‘customers’ and partners are Toyota’s commercial entities, such as Toyota Material Handling, Vanderlande, and Bastian. We have been supporting these companies in delivering large TICO business projects.
Since April 2024, key software engineering teams from Toyota Material Handling Europe, Vanderlande, and Bastian Solutions have transferred to T-Hive, as part of TICO’s move to concentrate autonomous vehicle software development effort into one special-purpose entity. With this acquisition, we aim to improve time to market and competitiveness, as well as reduce the overall research and development costs.
Our Objectives
We strive to help TICO Business Units achieve four goals:
1) Lead to offer in one day: reduce the time used to design automated systems and enable Business Units to capture sales opportunities by communicating timely and efficiently with customers.
2) Commissioning in one day: simplify the commissioning process and enable quicker, more efficient commissioning work for autonomous vehicle systems.
3) Zero support request: reduce the workload for customer support by providing a smart monitoring tool that can identify potential issues for active prevention and help the team get directly to the root causes when problems occur.
4) Open ecosystem: provide a platform for all TICO Business Units to collaborate and share solutions to develop quickly together as one group company.
Our culture
Our culture is simple and unique: a startup within a conglomerate. True agility, fast developments with extremely dedicated people, craftsmanship in every vain. But also built upon solid TICO foundations, with a huge network of international companies and market leader in many segments.
We live in a hybrid world – one that is more flexible, more innovative and more inclusive. A world that offers employees and teams autonomy in how and where they do their work, and a world that helps us create an inclusive future for all. We leave it up to the teams themselves to decide how they will work best in this new hybrid world.
Our technology
We want to embrace a sharing collaboration model to guard our manifesto, our architecture principles, our technology standards and the design evolution of our eco-system.
The core principles are:
- We develop our eco-system based on Decoupled Microservices that can scale and evolve independently.
- We apply Domain driven design for decoupling of the microservices with the support of the Principles of Least Astonishment and Least Effort.
- We maintain a common API Lifecycle Model to manage the interfaces between the microservices by means of the OpenAPI standard.
- We separate business logic from generic material handling functionality so that we can easily apply our solutions in multiple market segments.
- We embrace the idea that failures are inevitable. Instead of adding complexity to prevent failures from occurring, we design for failure up front. This will give us resilient solutions that can gracefully deal with and recover from failures.
- Our coding principles are based on the SOLID methodology.
- KISS (Keep it Simple, Stupid): no surprises, no effort, no unnecessary data sharing by applying the Principles of Least
Working at T-Hive
Led by CEO Leon Jansen, T-Hive is headquartered in the Netherlands, but our software engineers are working fully remotely from everywhere in the world.
Working at T-Hive means working with experts around the globe! T-Hive is a beehive of international experts working together on exciting challenges. Working at T-Hive also means working wherever you like: from one of the TICO offices around the world, or from your own home.
T-Hive has many opportunities for skilled engineers. Visit our vacancy page for more information.
