Optimising a car chassis

This paper presents a method to optimise a car chassis fitted either with p assive or active suspensions. Provided that a full vehicle model is availab le for accurate simulations of many different driving situations (J-turn, l ane-change, power-on/power-off on even/rough, dry/wet roads), the method al lows to tune the parameters of the chassis system (suspension elastokinemat ics, stiffnesses, dampings, actuator gains, tyre pressures...) in order to achieve the desired dynamic behaviour of the car in all of the considered d riving situations. According with the Global Approximation approach, the original physical car model is substituted by another purely numerical mathematical model (backp ropagating Artificial Neural Network). This reduces the simulation time dra matically and enables the optimisation process to come to successful result s. The computation of the Pareto-optimal set is performed by using Generic Algorithms. The method is validated by optimising the parameters of the sus pension system of an actual car.