Advanced sizing optimisation of concept vehicle structures

Sizing optimisation in the concept stage of vehicle product development is decisive in improving efficiently the static and dynamic performance of the vehicle structure. Although the state-of-the-art gradient-based (GB) approaches can be used for fast optimisation, only speed is not sufficient. The typical sizing optimisation problem for concept finite element (FE) models of the vehicle body and chassis canbeextremely complex -with thousands ofdesign variables, highly restricted and discontinuous domain, conflicting objectives. This paper aims to identify and validate an alternative global-search method in order to improve the quality of the final results. Differential evolution (DE) is chosen, implemented and applied for the optimisation of two concept models - a vehicle frame and body. The results confirm that DE can be a feasible alternative for large-scale engineering problems. As DE is robust, scalable, easy to tweak and requires reasonable time, it can be applied in the industry.