This paper deals with the design and optimization of a vehicle bumper subsystem, which is a key scenario for vehicle component design. More than ever before, the automotive industry operates in a highly competitive environment. Manufacturers must deal with competitive pressure and with conflicting demands from customers and regulatory bodies regarding the vehicle functional performance and the environmental and societal impact. Since also the time to market must be reduced, this forces them to develop products of increasing quality in even shorter time. As a result, bumper suppliers are under pressure to increasingly limit the weight, while meeting all relevant design targets for crashworthiness and safety. To succeed in such a challenging environment, manufacturers address the complex design problems by means of virtual modelling and simulation procedures that enable optimizing the performance of such subsystems as early as possible in the design timeline. For the bumper design challenge, an integrated methodology for multi-attribute design engineering of mechanical structures is set up. The integrated process captures the various tasks that are usually performed manually, this way facilitating the automated design iterations for optimization.
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