Adaptive surrogate models for the reliable lightweight design of automotive body structures

Abstract

One of the most challenging tasks in modern engineering is that of keeping the cost of manufactured goods small. With the advent of computational design, prototyping for instance, a major source of expenses, is reduced to its bare essentials. In fact, through the use of high-fidelity models, engineers can predict the behaviors of the systems they design quite faithfully. To be fully realistic, such models must embed uncertainties that may affect the physical properties or operating conditions of the system.

This PhD thesis deals with the constrained optimization of structures under uncertainties in the context of automotive design. The constraints are assessed through expensive finite element models. For practical purposes, such models are conveniently substituted by so-called surrogate models which stand as cheap and easy-to-evaluate proxies. In this PhD thesis, Gaussian process modeling and support vector machines are considered.

Upon reviewing state-of-the-art techniques for optimization under uncertainties, we propose a novel formulation for reliability-based design optimization which relies on quantiles. The formal equivalence of this formulation with the traditional ones is proved. This approach is then coupled to surrogate modeling. Kriging is considered thanks to its built-in error estimate which makes it convenient to adaptive sampling strategies. Such an approach allows us to reduce the computational budget by running the true model only in regions that are of interest to optimization. We therefore propose a two-stage enrichment scheme. The first stage is aimed at globally reducing the Kriging epistemic uncertainty in the vicinity of the limit-state surface. The second one is performed within iterations of optimization so as to locally improve the quantile accuracy. The efficiency of this approach is demonstrated through comparison with benchmark results.

An industrial application featuring a car under frontal impact is considered. The crash behavior of a car is indeed particularly affected by uncertainties. The proposed approach therefore allows us to find a reliable solution within a reduced number of calls to the true finite element model. For the extreme case where uncertainties trigger various crash scenarios of the car, it is proposed to rely on support vector machines for classification so as to predict the possible scenarios before metamodeling each of them separately.

Keywords

Surrogate modeling, adaptive design, uncertainties, reliability-based design optimization, quantiles, frontal impact.

BibTeX cite

@PHDTHESIS{MoustaphaThesis,
 author = {Moustapha, M.},
 title = {Adaptive surrogate models for the reliable lightweight design of automotive body structures},
 school = {Universit\'e Blaise Pascal, Clermont-Ferrand, France},
 year = {2016}
}