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Civil-Comp Proceedings
ISSN 1759-3433
CCP: 91
PROCEEDINGS OF THE TWELFTH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON CIVIL, STRUCTURAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL ENGINEERING COMPUTING
Edited by: B.H.V. Topping, L.F. Costa Neves and R.C. Barros
Paper 54

Methodological Support for the Early Stages of Vehicle Body Development: A Stochastic Design Approach for Passenger Vehicles

K. Kirchner and T. Vietor

Institute for Engineering Design, Technical University of Braunschweig, Germany

Full Bibliographic Reference for this paper
K. Kirchner, T. Vietor, "Methodological Support for the Early Stages of Vehicle Body Development: A Stochastic Design Approach for Passenger Vehicles", in B.H.V. Topping, L.F. Costa Neves, R.C. Barros, (Editors), "Proceedings of the Twelfth International Conference on Civil, Structural and Environmental Engineering Computing", Civil-Comp Press, Stirlingshire, UK, Paper 54, 2009. doi:10.4203/ccp.91.54
Keywords: computer aided design, vehicle engineering, body design, stochastic parameters.

Summary
The market for passenger vehicles is changing rapidly: individual customer needs are increasing the number of variants; globalization and expectation of the customers are reducing the market price; planning volume and time for production are decreasing; and the user profile of the vehicles is changing drastically. In future vehicles have to be developed in a significantly shorter time, the planning volume has to be reduced and the individual customer profile has to be considered. For automotive enterprises the factors of success are increasingly important: the shortening of development time, reduction of costs and increasing flexibility. To react to these changing conditions the Institute for Engineering Design is developing methods to support the early stages of the product development. This includes a parametric construction kit for the generation of vehicle body models (FlexBody) and a stochastic approach (StocCar) for the design and calculation of body engineering requirements. With this construction kit it is possible to implement parameter variations and to create CAD models. The stochastic approach supports the selection of the correct parameters. A combination of these methods provides quick and easy body CAD and CAE models, which are already very close to the subsequent product. The description of the modules of FlexBody and StocCar are the main subject of this paper. An extension is planned to develop a system for the complete design of vehicles including the consideration of stochastic quantities.

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