In an early design phase for vehicle crashworthiness, the use of classical optimization is limited. One reason for this is that development of structural components is distributed over different departments. Additionally, crash performance depends on several components and their interaction. Common components in vehicle architectures are subject to various load cases in multiple vehicles. Thus, the entire vehicle architecture has to be considered during optimization. In order to enable distributed development the system needs to be decoupled, which means that a variation in one component does not require modifications of other components in order to reach the global structural performance goal.

The objective of this paper is to introduce a method to define the component-wise force-deformation requirements of vehicle architectures for front crash structure design. The force-deformation properties of the components are subject to constraints, from which an analytical description of the design space of the vehicle architecture is derived. The optimal orthogonal solution space within this design space is identified via optimization process. This results in maximal intervals for variations of the component forces over their deformations under the given boundary conditions. The validity of the solution space is proven through explicit FE simulation.