Optimization of passenger car design for the mitigation of pedestrian head injury using a genetic algorithm

Abstract

The problem of pedestrian injury is a significant one throughout the world. In 2001, there were 4724 pedestrian fatalities in Europe and 4882 in the US. Significant advances have been made by automotive safety researchers and vehicle manufacturers to address this issue with respect to the design of vehicles, but the complex nature of pedestrian accident scenarios has resulted in great difficulty when using traditional statistical methods. Specifically, problems have been encountered when attempting to study the effects of individual parameters of vehicle front-end geometry on pedestrian head injury. This paper attempts to demonstrate the feasibility of applying the field of evolutionary computation to the problem of pedestrian safety by using a simple genetic algorithm to optimize the centre-line geometry of a car's front-end for the reduction of pedestrian head and thoracic injury. The fitness of each design is assessed by creating a multi-body mathematical model of the vehicle front and simulating impacts with models of different sized pedestrians, and ranking according to the combined injury scores.