A New Interval Inverse Analysis Method and Its Application in Vehicle Suspension Design

Interval inverse problems can be defined as problems to estimate input through given output, where the input and output are interval numbers. Many problems in engineering can be formulated as inverse problems like vehicle suspension design. Interval metrics, instead of deterministic metrics, are used for the suspension design of a vehicle vibration model with five degrees of freedom. The vibration properties of a vehicle vibration model are described by reasonable intervals and the suspension interval parameters are to be solved. A new interval inverse analysis method, which is a combination of Chebyshev inclusion function and optimization algorithm such as multi-island genetic algorithm, is presented and used for the suspension design of a vehicle vibration model with six conflicting objective functions. The interval design of suspension using such an interval inverse analysis method is shown and validated, and some useful conclusions are reached.