Ford MoDe:Link

2019: Solution description

On February 18, 2019 the Ford company announced carrying out tests of digital service MoDe: Link which will allow to coordinate several means of transport.

As noted in Ford, online trade volumes, and, on expectations of analysts around the world grow, only in Europe the number of orders for the goods delivery in the next 10 years will grow by the house twice. The most part of these orders is performed using vans that means growth of traffic in the cities. Delivery services need to transport more and more goods and to do it quicker, more economically, and at the same time to care for wellbeing of employees and environmental friendliness of the used transport.

MoDe: Link is the logistic program with a possibility of creation of multimodal routes using cloud computing. MoDe: Link will help couriers, to managers of corporate vehicle fleets, the logistic companies and delivery services of food to optimize delivery processes, more effectively to use the park of vans, to save time and money at simultaneous increase in volume of the processed orders, the developer considers.

Service can also improve customer service quality, having offered more convenient hours of delivery and more attractive quotations. Time from order placement will be reduced to delivery because vans will be able to come around more often on [[warehouse]. Besides, implementation of multimodal delivery will help to unload streets of the cities, to lower load of ecology and to free roads at sidewalks where commercial transport usually stops to unload goods, emphasized in Ford.

"Our purpose – to use big vehicles, such as commercial vans, for tasks with a high load and on the routes which are not overloaded with traffic i.e. in that environment where they work best of all. Nevertheless, on the last kilometer of a route lying on the urban area where there can be traffic jams and problems with the parking it makes sense to use more maneuverable, eco-friendly and cost-efficient means of transport for delivery". Tom Thompson, the project manager in division of Ford Mobility

The concept "a warehouse on wheels" provides compatibility both with the Ford vans, and with vehicles of other producers. These vans work as the dynamic centers of delivery which collect orders from a warehouse, and then for a while stop in the strategic points determined by the program as the most effective for full lot of orders. The patented software platform of Ford coordinates routes of the driver and the closest pedestrian couriers – and in the future, perhaps, and with bicycle couriers, drones and UAVs, – for delivery at the last stage, to the end consumer.

By Ford estimates, one van and a team of four couriers on foot or by bicycle during the work as a part of multimodal network can deliver as much sendings, as five vans working independently.