Optimal design of the floor panel for an automotive platform under uncertainty of the vehicle length

Abstract

Length of a vehicle is an important variation to generate different variants of an automotive platform. This parameter is usually adjusted by embedding dimensional flexibility into different components of the Body in White (BIW) including the floor pan. Due to future uncertainties, it is not necessarily possible to define certain values of wheelbase for the future products of a platform. This work is performed to add flexibility into the design process of a length-variable floor pan. By means of this analysis, the cost and time consuming process of optimization is not necessary to be performed for designing the different variants of a product family. Stiffness and mass of the floor pan are two important functional requirements of this component which directly affect the occupant comfort, dynamic characteristics, fuel economy and environmental protection of the vehicle. A combination of Genetic algorithm, GMDH-type of artificial neural networks and TOPSIS methods is used to optimally design the floor pan associated with arbitrary length of the variant in the defined system range. The correlation between the optimal results shows that for a constant mass of the floor pan, the first natural frequency decreases by increasing the length of this component.