Multi-Objective RBDO for Automotive Door Quality Design

This paper develops a multiobjective optimization methodology for automotive door quality design under uncertainty, in which the tradeoffs between two competing objectives need to be considered. Two important quality issues, door closing effort and wind noise, are of concern and the corresponding probabilities of unsatisfactory performance are considered in the optimization. Model-based reliability analysis methods are used to compute these probabilities. Both component and system-level reliability analyses need to be performed in RBDO. While a first order reliability method (FORM) is found adequate for the reliability estimation with respect to door closing effort, an adaptive Monte Carlo simulation method is found suitable for reliability analysis of the wind noise problem with multiple limit states. An efficient decoupled RBDO approach is used to solve the multiobjective optimization and the Pareto frontier is generated for decision-making. The proposed method can be applied to solve a wide variety of RBDO problems with competing objectives and reliability constraints at both component and system levels.