Citation

Zhou R, Fu Y, Kang S. Int. J. Veh. Safety 2005; 1(1,2,3): 168-180.

Affiliation

Ford Motor Company, MD 158, Product Development Center, 20901 Oakwood Blvd, Dearborn, MI 48124, USA.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2005, Inderscience Publishers)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

This paper presents an occupant-first approach, which allows for the simultaneous consideration of vehicle structure and the design of the occupant restraint system in the early stages. There are many difficulties in solving this problem, such as the large number of design variables, the large number of constraints and the highly non-linear nature of the occupant's responses. An efficient genetic algorithm (GA) is applied to deal with the challenges involved in the optimal design of the vehicle target pulse and the occupant restraint system. The methodology is demonstrated through a vehicle design problem. The results show that the occupant-first approach is effective and the GA is a valuable optimisation tool which can be used to achieve design targets.