On the use of multi-disciplinary optimisation methods for road vehicle passive suspension design

Two widely used decomposition-based multi-disciplinary optimisation (MDO) methods, namely analytical target cascading (ATC) and collaborative optimisation (CO), are applied to the design of the suspension system of a road vehicle. Instead of directly optimising the spring stiffness and the damping coefficient, three parameters of the spring and three parameters of the damper are selected as design variables. Discomfort, road holding, and the total mass of the spring-damper system, are considered as objective functions. An investigation is completed to analyse the performance of the two decomposition methods compared with the conventional all-in-one (AiO) formulation in terms of efficiency and applicability