Robust Optimal Design For Vehicle Handling Performance

Robust design as an effective way to improve the quality of products is becoming a more and more important method in the filed of product design especially in vehicle design.In this paper, a multi-body dynamic model was built with ADAMS/CAR which was used widely in vehicle simulation field. Recent developments in the field of robust design optimization is based on the platform which is constructed with the softwares of ADAMS/CAR, iSIGHT and MATLAB.A thorough analysis of the two mainly used methods of robust design, which are Taguchi method and the method using Response Surface Model (RSM), have been done on basis of the systemic review of the development and current research status of robust design. the two methods respectively were used to achieve improved Mc- pherson suspension bump performance as an integral part of simulation-based vehicle design. Afterwards, the difference of the results using the two methods has been discussed at the end of this section.A robust design procedure using the response surface model is applied to achieve improved vehicle handling performance . Considering about the complexness of the problem, a hybrid optimization algorithm including the Genetic Algorithm(GA) and Sequence Quadratic Programming (SQP) was promoted to solve the problem of getting local optimal result after the process of optimization. The results of the robust design illustrate that the proposed procedure is useful to get a more robust design result of the vehicle handling performance based on the simulation model.