A Hybrid Surrogate Modeling Approach for Vehicle Crash Simulations

Abstract

Integrated vehicle safety – a combination of active and passive vehicle safety systems has the potential to increase occupant safety dramatically. To adapt the passive safety components such as belt and airbag to a given collision scenario, the system requires a priori knowledge of the collision consequences, i.e. via a camera, radar or lidar system. Therefore, real-time capable surrogate models are needed, that predict the vehicle decelerations during a crash with high accuracy. To combine the strength of both data-driven and physics-based surrogate modeling techniques, a hybrid surrogate model consisting of a machine learning-enhanced spring-damper-mass model, is developed in this work. Thereby, the spring-damper-mass model describes the deformation behavior of the vehicle structure. A neural network is then trained to predict the stiffness and damping parameters of the simplified physical model based on the impact angle, the velocity and the offset of the vehicles.