In the coming years, car manufacturers will continue to diversify their fleet into an ever larger number of vehicle types. Cars will be developed with a focus on new special market requirements, responding to the customer’s individual needs. Until now, at most 3-4 vehicles were derived from 1 backbone car (e.g. convertibles, coupes). In the future, however, there will be many different types of cars within a vehicle class (like the compact class). BMW is developing new solutions to deal with this increasing diversity. Each new derivative will be based on a uniform vehicle architecture and standardized construction kits.

In order to have sufficient functional degrees of freedom within this architecture, it is necessary to take all planned derivatives into account. Among other requirements, crash performance has a strong influence on the limitations of diversity.

This paper describes a new virtual method to optimize a frontal restraint system based on finite element vehicle models.

On the basis of a limited number of finite element simulations, response surface models were developed to identify and visualize the functional relationship between restraint system parameters and dummy responses. With these surrogate or meta-models, the optimization will be faster compared to the standard development process.