Case Study: Ford Motor Company achieves rapid, production-quality fuel-cell ECU development with MathWorks Model-Based Design

Ford Motor Company and Pi Technology Develop Ford Focus Fuel Cell Vehicle Systems with Model-Based Design and Automatically Generated Production Code

Ford Motor Company needed to develop three new electronic control units (energy management, thermal system, and vehicle supervisory controllers) for the Ford Focus fuel cell vehicle while managing evolving requirements and tight safety and efficiency constraints. Pi Technology used MathWorks' Model-Based Design tools—including Simulink, Simulink Coder, Simulink Real-Time, and Stateflow—to build executable models, run simulations, and prototype control logic to meet these challenges.

Using MathWorks tools, Pi Technology created a common Freescale MPC555 hardware platform, developed reusable Simulink block libraries, validated designs with simulation and hardware-in-the-loop testing, and automatically generated production code that compiled and ran on target hardware without hand edits. The MathWorks-based workflow accelerated development, eliminated manual coding errors, kept models and code synchronized as an executable specification, produced portable multipurpose code, and enabled Ford engineers to iterate quickly while evaluating a fleet of fuel cell vehicles.

Ford Motor Company

Charlie Wartnaby

Ford Motor Company