Ford Motor Company Research Articles

Assumptions and simplifications in discrete-event simulation modelling

ABSTRACT All discrete-event simulation models are approximations of the real system that they represent. It is through making assumptions and incorporating simplifications into such models that they become an approximation. However, despite their importance, the 4definition, role and management of assumptions and simplifications is not well understood. In this paper we explore assumptions and simplifications in discrete-event simulation modelling in detail. Our approach is firstly to explore the existing literature on this topic, and then to draw this together with our extensive experience of real projects to recommend an approach to managing assumptions and simplifications in a simulation study. In doing so, we locate the role of assumptions and simplifications in a simulation study against knowledge acquisition and model abstraction respectively. We define the terms “assumptions” and “simplifications”, also identifying the role of “simplifying assumptions”. An approach to documenting, assessing and treating assumptions and simplifications which has been implemented in real projects is then described; and it is illustrated through application to a Ford Motor Company case study. This paper provides much needed clarity on the topic of assumptions and simplifications in simulation modelling, and it sets out a means for managing assumptions and simplifications during a simulation study.

OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT STRUCTURE APPLIED IN PRICING RATE DESIGN IMPLEMENTATION

Companies in competitive industries find themselves in positions of needing to provide quality goods and services in ways that are efficient in terms of both production and cost. Because of this pressure toward efficiency, the Ford Motor Company, among many others, has had to reorganize its operational strategy. We analyze the ten strategic operational areas in which Ford made improvements, and we then go on to apply this framework to other sectors, including the energy sector. In doing so, we give recommendations for ProRate Energy Inc.’s innovative rate design, called ProRate/CLEP, which can benefit and improve operational efficiencies in implementing this innovative time-of-use rate design.

IT IS THE QUALITY OF OUR CHARACTER THAT DETERMINES OUR PERFORMANCE AND RESULTS

AbstractThe author, Leader to Leader’s editor‐in‐chief, examines the rapid changes in today’s society, and how leaders react to and lead through these changes. She nods to the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus (c. 535–475 BC), and begins with a quotation from former Ford Motor Company CEO Alan Mulally. She also quotes from Leader to Leader’s founder, Frances Hesselbein, in her 2005 column “The Leaders We Need”: “In the end, it is the quality and character of the leader that determines the performance, the results.” An important distinction in how leaders adapt and lead through change is to not compromise our values and ethics for the sake of expediency. Recalling one particular example drawn from a story told by a client about someone they had coached, McArthur writes, “Yet, in the end, the leader chose to bend just a touch to meet goals and stay employed rather than to live the values agreed upon by the leadership team and committed to by the entire company.”

THE BUSINESS PLAN REVIEW—THE HEARTBEAT OF OUR ORGANIZATION

AbstractThe authors have first‐hand experience working with Alan Mulally's Our “Working Together”© Leadership and Management System (Mulally is the former CEO of Boeing Commercial Airplanes and Ford Motor Company). The authors describe the Business Plan Review (BPR), one of the five elements of the system, and note that the other elements are the principles and practices, the governance process, the leadership team, and the creating value roadmap. They describe what the BPR is, how it is used, and “how a typical BPR looks and works.” While the system, and the BPR itself, is probably best known through the two major companies led by Mulally, the authors write that “the BPR approach and structure works in any setting and has been integral to our own business since the beginning. We started as a team of two and have grown to include two more team members. The BPR helps our small team stay on track, focused on our mission, aligned with our values and operating principles, and reinforces our culture.” In the conclusion, they note that “by encouraging open communication, shared objectives, and strong leadership, BPR cultivates a culture of respect where everyone feels valued, empowered, and motivated to contribute to success.”

Efficient Management of Containers for Software Defined Vehicles

Containerization technology, such as Docker, is gaining in popularity in newly established software-defined vehicle architectures (SDVA). However, executing those containers can quickly become computationally expensive in constrained environments, given the limited CPU, memory, and energy resources in the Electric Control Units (ECU) of SDVA. Consequently, the efficient management of these containers is crucial for enabling the on-demand usage of the applications in the vehicle based on the available resources while considering several constraints and priorities, including failure tolerance, security, safety, and comfort. In this paper, we propose a dynamic software container management approach for constrained environments such as embedded devices/ECUs in SDVA within smart cars. To address the conflicting objectives and constraints within the vehicle, we design a novel search-based approach based on multi-objective optimization. This approach facilitates the allocation, movement, or suspension of containers between ECUs in the cluster. Collaborating with our industry partner, Ford Motor Company, we evaluate our approach using different real-world software-defined scenarios. These scenarios involve using heterogeneous clusters of ECU devices in vehicles based on real-world software containers and use-case studies from the automotive industry. The experimental results demonstrate that our scheduler outperforms existing scheduling algorithms, including the default Docker scheduler -Spread- commonly used in automotive applications. Our proposed scheduler exhibits superior performance in terms of energy and resource cost efficiency. Specifically, it achieves a 35% reduction in energy consumption in power-saving mode compared to the scheduler employed by Ford Motor Company. Additionally, our scheduler effectively distributes workload among the ECUs in the cluster, minimizing resource usage, and dynamically adjusts to the real-time requirements and constraints of the car environment. This work will serve as a fundamental building block in the automotive industry to efficiently manage software containers in smart vehicles considering constraints and priorities in the real world.

Financial Analysis and Future Outlook of Ford Motor Company

Ford Motor Company is an American multinational automaker founded in 1903. It is one of the largest automobile manufacturers in the world. This research delves into the financial condition of Ford Motor Company, an automotive industry leader, to provide a comprehensive analysis of its financial performance and prospects. Against the backdrop of an evolving automotive landscape and increasing consumer demand for sustainable and technologically advanced vehicles, this study is timely and relevant. The primary objective of this paper is to scrutinize Ford's financial health and prospects in-depth. The research combines quantitative data analysis of Ford's financial statements, historical performance, and market trends with a qualitative assessment of its strategic positioning and competitive environment. The findings indicate that while Ford faces certain financial challenges, it possesses the potential for growth and innovation. Recommendations include leveraging 5G technology to enhance product quality and cautiously exploring opportunities in the electric vehicle sector.

Freedom to Operate analysis as competitive necessity—the Selden automobile patent case revisited

Abstract We contribute a unique empirical account of Freedom to Operate (FTO) analysis in respect to patent claims of others to avoid infringement liability. Over a century ago, the Selden automobile patent owners asserted that its scope encompassed early US automobiles. FTO analyses of the Selden patent claims demonstrated their narrow scope and hence their non-infringement. The legal opinion by patent attorney Parker on the Selden patent gave Ford Motor Company the confidence to publicly indemnify its customers from infringement liability and to publicly challenge the broad claim interpretation of the Selden patent. The asserted broad interpretation of Selden’s patent claims is sometimes alleged today to have retarded US automobile industry development but a review of commercial evidence of the development does not support this conjecture. That developers were undeterred is consistent with the FTO analyses conducted by Ford and others, and the patentee’s avoidance of a court challenge to the validity of the Selden patent on the merits. The Selden case should be known as the classic empirical example of how firms conduct FTO analysis to assess patent scope and validity to enable continued development. The prevalence of FTO practice today should be considered as a reason why such conjectured economic harms from ‘over-broad’ patents may not be realized today. Yet, we found a dearth of publicly available FTO analyses and lack of rigorous empirical studies demonstrating the actual extent of FTO analyses. Given continuing concerns over the harms from ‘over-broad’ patents, there is a need for research into the economics and behavioural influence of FTO analysis.

Physics-informed neural networks to advance pavement engineering and management

Physics-informed neural networks (PINN) are machine learning (ML) algorithms that can bridge the gap between our understanding of physical phenomena and the corresponding empirical observations. This paper discusses applications of physics-integrated ML to advance pavement engineering. To demonstrate an example, a PINN model was pretrained to approximate the simulation of vehicles’ suspension responses to longitudinal road profiles. The parameters of the outer layers were finetuned to adapt model output to the standard International Roughness Index (IRI), while keeping the pretrained inner layers to preserve the embedded physical knowledge of the suspension behaviour. The PINN model showed low bias and standard error in predicting IRI values on training, test, and an independent dataset from an autonomous vehicle study by the Ford Motor Company. This approach to reconcile and supplement infrequent survey data with spatiotemporally continuous data (from connected vehicles) can enhance data-driven practices for pavement design, maintenance and asset management.

Market Competition Analysis and Strategic Research of Ford Motor Company

In the trend of global electrification and intelligence of automobiles, many large traditional fuel vehicle companies are facing huge transformation challenges, which may determine the fate of future car companies. This article selects Ford Motor Company, a large multinational enterprise in the United States, and uses methods such as macro analysis of the automotive industry, comparative analysis of indicators, DuPont analysis, strategic analysis, and risk analysis to study the current situation of Ford Motor Company. This article finds that Ford Motor Company's fuel vehicle market has performed well and stably, which can offset the significant research and development and losses of electric vehicles in recent years. Despite Ford's sluggish performance in the Chinese market in recent years and mediocre sales of electric vehicles, Ford has also made sustained strategic adjustments and actively responded. Finally, this article also proposes that Ford Motor Company should seize the hybrid vehicle market, seize the advantages accumulated by traditional popular models for a long time, and continuously promote localization adjustments in various regions.

Freedom to Operate Analysis as Competitive Necessity - The Selden Patent Case Revisited

A current policy concern is that the alleged uncertainty over the enforceability of “overly-broad” patents of “dubious validity” may retard innovation. We take the Selden patent on the automobile as a classic of this type of patent. We review the evidence of commercial development during its term and show that there is no evidence that innovation was retarded. To better understand this result we follow Henry Ford’s investigation of the Selden patent’s scope during 1903, the year when the Ford Motor Co. was most vulnerable to “uncertainty” over the enforceability of the asserted broad construction of the Selden patent claims. We use new primary sources to show how Henry Ford and others engaged in what today is called “Freedom to Operate” patent analysis when it most mattered commercially. We show that Ford correctly anticipated that a future court adjudication of the Selden patent claims would not support the broad construction of those claims. Ford’s and the Ford Motor Co.’s confidence in their understanding was powerfully illustrated by their Company’s public offer to indemnify purchasers of Ford automobiles against the threatened suits for infringement under the Selden patent. This and other public actions effectively induced the Selden patent owners to bring suit against the Ford Motor Company. Finally, we show that the Ford Motor Company litigation costs in its first year of operation were trivial yet litigation brought valuable market publicity. We find that Henry Ford’s investigative actions provide an exemplary model for what innovators unremarkably do today when faced with “uncertainty” over the breadth or validity of patent claims.

Ford Motor Company Reorganization and Case Study Analysis

The automobile industry has a long and fascinating history. In the past ten years, the automobile industry has been developing continuously to adapt to changing market conditions and technological progress. With the growth of networked devices and Internet of Things (IoT), the automotive industry pays more attention to data analysis. Companies are using data to optimize operations, improve maintenance and improve security. In recent ten years, there has been a trend of integration in the automobile industry, and a few large companies have monopolized the market. This leads to the intensification of competition and the pressure of innovation. Ford Motor Company is a global automobile company, which has undergone major changes in recent years as part of the restructuring aimed at improving its financial performance and preparing for the company's future growth. This paper will outline the reorganization of Ford Motor Company, including the reasons, main measures involved and financial results of the reorganization. Enterprise reorganization is an effective strategic choice for Ford Motor Company, which can help enterprises adapt to changes in the external environment and improve their competitiveness and profitability. The case analysis of two reorganizations of Ford Motor Company in this paper can not only provide reference and enlightenment for other enterprises to reorganize, but also provide reference and basis for the in-depth study of enterprise reorganization in academic circles.

OUR GREATEST OPPOSITION IS OUR DIVISION

AbstractThe author connects her work of 2001 as a writer and managing editor for a research project about the “global leader of the future,” which grew into the book Global Leadership: the Next Generation; with her current work as editor‐in‐chief of Leader to Leader. It is also connected with her earlier partnership and collaboration with Frances Hesselbein, Leader to Leader’s founder and longtime editor‐in‐chief. This is further tied to the author’s collaborations with former CEO of Boeing Commercial Airplanes and Ford Motor Company, Alan Mulally. The latter was the first recipient of the Leader to Leader Institute’s Leader of the Future award, presented by Hesselbein in 2006. The author shares remarks she “made recently at a 100 Coaches event in Nashville that describe why Frances Hesselbein, Marshall Goldsmith, I, and many more, want Alan’s ’Working Together’ to reach as broad an audience as possible.” Within she includes comments made by Frances in 2006 for the award presented to Mulally: “Alan is the leader in Marshall’s vision of the stakeholder centered leader whose leadership and management system includes all of the stakeholders and helps successful leaders, their teams and organizations become even more successful using stakeholder centered coaching.”

THE FIVE KEY QUALITIES OF LEVEL 5 LEADERS AND HOW WE CAN DEVELOP THEM IN FUTURE LEADERS

AbstractThe authors (Chartered Engineer & Business Leader at Rolls‐Royce and Editor‐in‐Chief of Leader to Leader) build on the concept of “level 5 leaders,” from Jim Collins's classic book Good to Great. They outline and describe the concept, and write that their “review of 7 out of 11 of the level 5 leaders in Jim's book showed the following 5 leadership qualities that created this combination of humility and will.” Those qualities, in their words, are: 1. Purpose before profits 2. Connection before critical thinking 3. Service before seniority 4. Creativity before control 5. Coaching for mastery. Each of these qualities is outlined in depth regarding recent leaders: Frances Hesselbein (Former CEO of Girl Scouts of the USA, Namesake of Frances Hesselbein Leadership Forum, Founder and longtime Editor‐in‐Chief of Leader to Leader, Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient); Alan Mulally, (Former CEO of Boeing Commercial Airplanes, Boeing Defense and Space, and the Ford Motor Company); and Hubert Joly (Former Chairman and CEO of Best Buy, recognized top 10 U.S. CEO, Glassdoor: Unleashing Human Magic). They write that these leaders “advocate an approach where all stakeholders are included to create insights, implement change, and follow up to deliver sustainable and long‐term improvement.”

ESG Evaluation in Automobile Industry --Take Ford Motor Company and Tesla Company as Example

With the outbreak of natural disasters and extreme weather, people are paying more and more attention to protecting the environment and society. This society is gradually de-manding more and more from companies. In this context, the new concept of ESG has emerged under the call of the United Nations. This article details MSCI's ESG scoring sys-tem and what it covers. Through the ESC scoring system of MSCI, this paper analyzes Ford Motor Company, represented by gasoline cars, and Tesla Company, represented by electric cars, to reflect the current development of environment, society, and governance in the American automobile industry. We found that the overall ESG development of the American automotive industry still needs to be improved. Companies should also strength-en the development of management social aspects and corporate governance while consid-ering the development of environmentally friendly products.

HOW TO BE AND DO TO CREATE VALUE FOR ALL THE STAKEHOLDERS AND THE GREATER GOOD

AbstractThe author, the former President and CEO of Boeing Commercial Airplanes and former CEO of the Ford Motor Company, recounts his long friendship and collaboration with Frances Hesselbein. Like so many others, he initially met her through the pioneering executive coach Marshall Goldsmith. “Over these many decades,” the author writes, “before and since Frances and I met, my life’s work, my love and service, has been developing, implementing, and sharing the ‘Working Together’ Leadership and Management System, with its process and behaviors that support the Be and the Do, the character and competencies, and the principles and practices of leaders who create value for all the stakeholders and the greater good. Who Frances was, her character and heart, are hugely responsible for encouraging my leadership service journey.”

Efficient Algorithms for Stochastic Ride-Pooling Assignment with Mixed Fleets

Ride-pooling, which accommodates multiple passenger requests in a single trip, has the potential to substantially enhance the throughput of mobility-on-demand (MoD) systems. This paper investigates MoD systems that operate mixed fleets composed of “basic supply” and “augmented supply” vehicles. When the basic supply is insufficient to satisfy demand, augmented supply vehicles can be repositioned to serve rides at a higher operational cost. We formulate the joint vehicle repositioning and ride-pooling assignment problem as a two-stage stochastic integer program, where repositioning augmented supply vehicles precedes the realization of ride requests. Sequential ride-pooling assignments aim to maximize total utility or profit on a shareability graph: a hypergraph representing the matching compatibility between available vehicles and pending requests. Two approximation algorithms for midcapacity and high-capacity vehicles are proposed in this paper; the respective approximation ratios are [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text], where p is the maximum vehicle capacity plus one. Our study evaluates the performance of these approximation algorithms using an MoD simulator, demonstrating that these algorithms can parallelize computations and achieve solutions with small optimality gaps (typically within 1%). These efficient algorithms pave the way for various multimodal and multiclass MoD applications. History: This paper has been accepted for the Transportation Science Special Issue on Emerging Topics in Transportation Science and Logistics. Funding: This work was supported by the National Science Foundation [Grants CCF-2006778 and FW-HTF-P 2222806], the Ford Motor Company, and the Division of Civil, Mechanical, and Manufacturing Innovation [Grants CMMI-1854684, CMMI-1904575, and CMMI-1940766]. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/trsc.2021.0349 .

THE CASE FOR LEADER MORALITY

AbstractThe authors contend that in a world of great change and ever‐increasing tough problems, leaders must factor in the topic of morality as they work and make decisions. Gist is a former academic at the University of Washington and Seattle University; and Mulally is the former CEO of Boeing Commercial Airplanes and Ford Motor Company. They point to the need of morality as “virtues an individual has that guide how he or she actually determines what is the right thing to do and behaves accordingly.” They amplify that “In essence, morality refers to human judgment that some things are right while others are wrong, and that social standards or norms exist to distinguish and guide those determinations.” They draw on examples of morality‐deficient decisions by some pharmaceutical executives and the relation to opiate addiction; and social media company executives who prioritize content that leads to the most “engagement.” Unfortunately, this engagement can become inflammatory. The resulting “negative impact on society includes increasing political polarization, escalating racism, and growing violence.” The authors discuss Gist’s concept of Leader Humility, which “drives the moral virtues of honesty and courage.” Within that is the concept of self‐honesty: “It takes confidence to review one’s behavior, acknowledge weaknesses, mistakes, and personal motives.”

The Ford Rolling Road Wind Tunnel Facility

<div class="section abstract"><div class="htmlview paragraph">The Ford Motor Company Rolling Road Wind Tunnel (RRWT) is a state-of-the-art aerodynamic wind tunnel test facility in Allen Park, Michigan. The RRWT has operated since January 2022 and is designed for passenger and motorsport vehicle development. The test facility includes an office area, three secure customer vehicle preparation bays, a garage area, a vehicle frontal area measurement system, and a full-scale ¾ open jet wind tunnel. The wind tunnel features an interchangeable single belt and 5-belt Moving Ground Plane (MGP) system with an integrated 6-component balance, a two-position nozzle, boundary layer removal systems, and two independent flow traverse systems. Each flow traverse has a large horizontal box beam and vertical Z-strut that can position the flow traverse accurately within the test volume. The individual traverse systems can also operate in tandem and have the capability to perform stereo PIV measurements and scale model vehicle testing, including vehicle passing or drafting simulations. The MGP can be quickly changed between single belt and 5-belt operations, requiring only a single eight-hour shift to transition between the two configurations. The efficient wind tunnel airline is capable of airspeeds up to 250 km/h in the large 26.4 m<sup>2</sup> nozzle configuration and 322 km/h in the small 18.6 m<sup>2</sup> nozzle configuration using a 12-blade, 8 m diameter fan with a 5.4 MW motor. The wind tunnel’s flow quality and aerodynamic performance compare well with similar facilities in the automotive industry. Ford Motor Company is currently correlating aerodynamic measurement data from the RRWT with other similar facilities, using 60 vehicles across multiple product lines.</div></div>

Academic and Corporate Vehicle Electrification Research

We developed and used methodology to analyze scientific publications in Scopus relating to vehicle electrification and associated key enabling technologies: batteries, fuel cells and electric machines with power electronics. The global research landscape was mapped, and an analysis of the 16 most active countries was carried out. Vehicle electrification publications are rewarded with a high citation impact, and they include corporate actors to a great extent. China dominates in vehicle electrification research as well as in the enabling technologies, and China’s position is set to become even more dominating. Battery research has grown rapidly with a high citation impact, whereas the volume of research for the other enabling technologies was more constant during 2017–2021. Automakers’ research that has led to scientific publications was specifically studied. Ford Motor Company was the automaker with the highest number of vehicle electrification publications during 2017–2021. A large share of the automakers’ publications was co-authored with academic actors, and such publications were rewarded with a higher citation impact than those without. However, the share of international co-publications among the automakers was meager. It is concluded that the analysis of vehicle electrification publications gives an overview of the rapidly developing field. Moreover, the analysis of automakers’ involvement in such research is one way of obtaining one perspective on their strategies and priorities.

Radio espacio estacion broadcast Fordlândia

On September 16th and 17th, 2017, the nomadic online radio station radioee broadcast from Fordlândia, today a district of the city of Aveiro, state of Pará, in the Brazilian Amazonia. Produced by artist Augustina Woodgate along with cultural producers Stephanie Sherman and Hernan Woodgate and several other partners in every new location, Radio Espacio Estacion/radioee was conceived as a multilingual, mobile, online radio station set up around 24-hour/36-hour long events broadcast from different parts of the world to discuss issues of migration, mobility, transportation, environment, and climate change. In Transmissão Fordlândia, radioee revisited the legendary history of the site’s foundation by the Ford Motor Company in 1927. The broadcast questions the official narrative of desertion after Ford’s enterprise failed, which implies ideas of underdevelopment associated with a colonial modern economy of representation of Latin America. Adopting live and online radio communication, based on immediacy, synchronicity, and accessibility, Transmissão Fordlândia combined research, interviews, and first-hand descriptions of the site in a continual multilingual conversation, producing a non-linear narrative enriched with a bustling soundscape of people, birds, water, motorcycles, boats, and everyday activities, transmitted to a global audience. This paper investigates how Transmissão Fordlândia articulates an ecocritical approach to space through site-oriented practices and sonic-spatial imagination, challenging colonial modern representations of tropical landscapes based on spatial rationalization and the duality of culture–nature. This paper also explores the sonic-spatial effects of live radio transmission as an aesthetic device for imagining place.