Combined maximization of interior comfort and frontal crashworthiness in preliminary vehicle design

Designing for improved interior comfort and crashworthiness is an important but competing objective in vehicle development. These objectives are linked by common design decisions on allocating a fixed total amount of space, and so they should be addressed together. Such combined optimisation is hindered by the large computational effort required for crash analysis using full-scale vehicle models and by the lack of adequate interior comfort models. In this paper, a driver and rear passenger seating comfort model is combined with a modest but adequate frontal crashworthiness model into an overall system optimisation problem. Solution of the combined problem allows a quantitative investigation into design tradeoffs between comfort and safety. The results suggest that combined optimisation can lead to superior vehicle designs and they motivate more detailed studies with models of increased fidelity.