Identification of Crashworthy Designs Combining Active Learning and the Solution Space Methodology

Abstract This study introduces a novel methodology for vehicle development under crashworthiness constraints. We propose coupling the solution space method (SSM) with active learning reliability (ALR) to map global requirements, i.e., safety requirements on the whole vehicle, to the design parameters associated with a component. To this purpose, we use a classifier to distinguish between the design that fulfills the requirements, the safe domain, and those that do not, the failure domain. This classifier is trained on finite element simulations, exploiting the learning strategies used by ALR to efficiently and precisely identify the border between the two domains and the information provided on these domains by the SSM. We then provide an exemplary application where the efficiency of the method is shown: the safe domain is identified with 270 samples and an average total error of 2.5%. The methodology we propose here is an efficient method to identify safe designs at a comparatively low computational budget. To the best of our knowledge, there is currently no methodology available that can identify regions in the design space that result in designs satisfying the local requirements set by the SSM due to the complexity and strong nonlinearity of crashworthiness simulations. The proposed coupling exploits the information of SSM and the capabilities of ALR to provide a fast mapping between the global requirements and the design parameters, which can, in turn, be made available to the designers to inexpensively evaluate the crashworthiness of new shapes and component features.