The product developing process in the automotive industry is determined by a permanent shortening of the innovation cycles. To cope with this, automatic optimization methods are more and more integrated in this process. State of the art in the field of car body investigation is the optimization of sheet metal gauges to reduce the mass of the body-in-white. This method is mainly used at the end of the developing process. In the early stage, efficient methods adapted to the particular characteristics of the early phases are still missing. To close this gap, two methods are presented in this paper for the optimization of the crashworthiness. The first, a linear topological method, is used to detect the principle structure of car bodies. The second, a non-linear, parameter-based shape optimization, enables an optimization of a complete body-in-white and refines the first approach.     «

The product developing process in the automotive industry is determined by a permanent shortening of the innovation cycles. To cope with this, automatic optimization methods are more and more integrated in this process. State of the art in the field of car body investigation is the optimization of sheet metal gauges to reduce the mass of the body-in-white. This method is mainly used at the end of the developing process. In the early stage, efficient methods adapted to the particular characterist...     »