Optimisation study on multibody vehicle-front model for pedestrian safety

ABSTRACT

Ensuring the safety of pedestrians in a crash with automobiles remains a vehicle design challenge. Multibody simulations were developed in MADYMO to simulate a crash of a parametrised vehicle front model (14 parameters) against three different Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research (TNO) pedestrian models (50th %le M, 5th %le F, 6 Y.O. Child). Threat to a targeted pedestrian population was measured using a weighted injury cost (WIC) measure. A pedestrian friendly vehicle profile was obtained using genetic algorithm-based global optimisation to minimise WIC with geometric constraints on vehicle profile. With known limitations, at least one pedestrian-friendly vehicle shape not resembling any existing vehicle profile was found.

KEYWORDS:

• Pedestrian safety
• injury cost
• vehicle front optimisation
• multibody simulations
• genetic algorithms

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank DAAD for providing a Sandwich model fellowship as financial support for the first author to work in TU, Berlin. The authors also wish to thank Transportation Research and Injury Prevention Program, IIT Delhi for providing valuable support during the entire work. The first author would also wish to thank Ministry of Urban Development, Government of India for the financial support through Research Grant.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Funding

Ministry of Urban Development, Government of India.