ABSTRACT
Enhancing the efficiency in a vehicle development process requires reducing time-consuming tasks such as building prototypes or performing test drives by utilizing more efficient virtual approaches. A common one is numerical optimization. Often, optimization does not consider feasibility of the proposed design. The scope of this paper is a new method that simultaneously considers feasibility and therefore offers great potential for saving both, development time and cost. Based on performance targets of the overall vehicle: first, the requirements on properties of highly integrated subsystems are derived as permissible ranges, and second, suitable suspension architectures that fulfill those requirements are identified. As result, the decision making engineer is provided with objective criteria for choosing a suspension system that suits to his needs. Projections of solution box intervals to 2D design space diagrams are used to find the permissible ranges while the suspension architecture is evaluated by a multi-objective optimization. Two types of suspension architectures are compared in order to achieve their design goals.
