Title: The optimisation of spot-weld positions for vehicle design by using hybrid meta-heuristics

Authors: Hiroshi Hasegawa, Hiroto Sasaki, Hiroyasu Uehara, Keishi Kawamo

Addresses: Department of Machinery & Control systems, Faculty of Systems Engineering, Shibaura Institute of Technology, 307 Fukasaku, Minuma-ku, Saitama-shi, Saitama 337-8570, Japan. ' Division of Mechanical Engineering, Graduate School of Engineering, Shibaura Institute of Technology, 307 Fukasaku, Minuma-ku, Saitama-shi, Saitama 337-8570, Japan. ' PENTAX Corporation, 2-36-9, Maeno-cho, Itabashi-ku, Tokyo 174-8639, Japan. ' Graduate School of Engineering Management, Shibaura Institute of Technology, Sumitomo Mita building, 5-37-8 Shibaura, Minato-ku, Tokyo 108-0014, Japan

Abstract: Digital engineering is considered to be a powerful technology for improving the competitive power of products. Optimal design is an especially important technology. Products that have a competitive power usually have core technologies in design and manufacturing fields. Spot-weld technology, such as the positions and number of spot-welds on the white-body, indicates the technological level of an automotive company. This technology is a typical core technology. In this paper, a meta-heuristic method is proposed, an integer optimisation method on the discrete type, by using hybrid meta-heuristics for vehicle design. The proposed method is applied to some benchmark functions to check its performance, and it is shown that it improves the computational cost and convergence up to the optimal solution. Furthermore, the paper deals with the optimisation of spot-weld positions by the proposed method for aiding the core technology of the vehicle design. The effectiveness of the proposed method is discussed through optimisation of benchmark functions and spot-weld positions.

Keywords: vehicle design; direct search; evolutionary computation; finite element method; FEM; genetic algorithms; automotive manufacturing; meta-heuristics; multi-peak optimisation; simulated annealing; spot welding; spot weld positions; optimal design.

DOI: 10.1504/IJVD.2007.012301

International Journal of Vehicle Design, 2007 Vol.43 No.1/2/3/4, pp.151 - 172

Published online: 04 Feb 2007 *

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