Global optimisation of the car front-end geometry to minimise pedestrian head injury levels

Abstract

The paper presents a multidisciplinary design optimisation strategy for car front-end profile to minimise head injury criteria across pedestrian groups. A hybrid modelling strategy was used to simulate the car-pedestrian impact events, combining parametric modelling of front-car geometry with pedestrian models for the kinematics of crash impact. A space filling response surface modelling strategy was deployed to study the head injury response, with Optimal Latin Hypercube (OLH) Design of Experiments sampling and Kriging technique to fit response models. The study argues that the optimisation of the front-end car geometry for each of the individual pedestrian models, using evolutionary optimisation algorithms is not an effective global optimization strategy as the solutions are not acceptable for other pedestrian groups. Collaborative Optimisation (CO) multidisciplinary design optimisation architecture is introduced instead as a global optimisation strategy, and proven that it can enable simultaneous minimisation of head injury levels for all the pedestrian groups, delivering a global optimum solution which meets the safety requirements across the pedestrian groups.