In today’s fast changing world, the key to success in vehicle design is to bring the vehicle to the Customers at the earliest possible date. Also vehicles should possess the highest quality and safety standards, as both are imporîant features to the customers. To achieve this, safety CAE should be used to set targets and guide design in the up~front process instead of trial-and-error approach. To make safe vehicle upfront stage is very crucial in determining vehicle architec~ ture, performing trade-off studies and setting design targets. All of this can be achieved by using safety CAE Concept! Hybrid Models in the early design stages, Where trend prediction is more important than exact prediction.

This paper illustrates development of one such safety CAE tool. The MADYMO full vehicle concept model of a body-on-frame utility vehicle for frontal impact was developed to perform up-front safety analysis. This full vehicle model is capable of predicting both structural and occupant response. To gain Confidence, the model was correlated with the test for both structural and occupant response. A problem of higher chest was identified. Two approaches were taken to look at the problem:​

• Direct optimization was used with some parameters to minimize the chest G’s.
• DOE (Design of Experiments)approach was used to study the sensitivity analysis and understand the interaction of various components on the response of interest (chest G’s).

The results and the direction provided by both the approaches are compared later. This paper demonstrates the approach to Solve Such problems. A methodology was also developed to generate this type of MADYMO concept models for all other similar type of configuration. This new tool needs geometry, weight, stiffness characteristics ete. of key components as an input. Based on this information it generates the full vehicle MADYMO model which can be used to predict occupant and structural response. This method has been implemented for body-on-frame pick-up trucks and utility vehicles. Later it will be extended for unibody and subframe type vehicles. Once implemented this new method will help drive a more efficient and effective design for safety.