Abstract

Enterprise Multidisciplinary Design Optimization  

The automotive industry is often challenged by numerous complex and often conflicting requirements such as compress vehicle design cycle time, lower weight and cost of vehicles, and improve product performances, e.g., safety, NVH, durability, quality, fuel economy, reliability etc.  To satisfy these stringent requirements, we are increasingly relying on the use of the most promising technologies in simulations, analysis, and multidisciplinary design optimization (MDO) for large-scale vehicle program applications.  Traditional MDO is a time consuming, difficult, and expert dependent process, which may not reach the full potential of the advanced MDO technologies.  In this talk, a new web-based and mobile-enabled Enterprise Multidisciplinary Design Optimization System (EMDO) system will be presented.  It provides a collaborative and distributed execution platform to manage the complexity of the growing demands of large-scale vehicle design projects, and it has potential to make significant contributions to cross-attribute program developments in terms of weight saving, fuel economic increase, meeting or exceeding multiple attribute requirements, as well as reducing product development time and engineering cost.  Several large-scale vehicle design case studies will be used to demonstrate the capabilities and usefulness of the new EMDO system.

About the Speaker

Dr. Yan Fu, Ford Motor Company

Manager and Technical Leader, PD and Strategy Analytics

Dr. Yan Fu is Manager and Technical Leader of Business Strategy and Engineering Optimization, and she is leading the Product Development and Strategy Analytics Group at Ford Global Data, Insight & Analytics (GDIA).  Dr. Fu and her team are currently developing sophisticated business analytics, optimization and other strategic decision support tools to support business decision making, vehicle and powertrain design optimization and robustness, fuel economy strategy, and safety initiatives.  During the past 16 years at Ford, Dr. Fu has led the developments and applications of advanced optimization and robust design technologies for vehicle safety design, which enable many of the Ford vehicle programs to achieve Insurance Institute for Highway Safety Top Safety Pick Award, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration New Car Assessment Program 5-Star, and meet or exceed requirements mandated by the new Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards, simultaneously.  Dr. Fu has authored or co-authored 36 technical papers in peer-reviewed journals and 67 technical papers in various conference proceedings.  Dr. Fu is the recipient of numerous honors and awards including some of the most prestigious technical achievement awards, such as 2011 SAE Henry Ford II Distinguish Award for Excellence in Automotive Engineering, 2005 and 2008 Henry Ford Technology Awards.  Dr. Fu is an Executive Committee Member - Industry Liaison for the ASME Design Automation Conference and an Associate Editor of the SAE International Journal of Materials & Manufacturing.  She is a member of the SAE International, American Society of Mechanical Engineers, and International Society on Multiple Criteria Decision Making.  Dr. Fu is also a member of SAE Women Engineers Committee, which she dedicates herself to encourage women to take engineering job and bring innovative ideas to the product development world.  Dr. Fu received her B.S. from Tsinghua University in 1994 and her M.S. degree from Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1996 in Beijing, China.  She received her Ph.D. degree in Civil and Environmental Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, USA in 2000.