Optimization Criteria for Vehicles Travelling on a Randomly Profiled Road-a Survey

A 5-DOF plane vehicle model is studied. A randomly profiled road is assumed to impart normally distributed stationary vertical random displacements to the front and rear wheels. Several vehicle performance criteria based on response mean square spectral densities are discussed. It is emphasized that these performance criteria contain more information than do the simple response standard deviations. A computer program has been developed for optimization of two or more of the system parameters to make a vehicle response (or a weighted sum of responses) a minimum. Constraints on parameters and responses can be introduced. Ride comfort, road holding, energy absorption, fatigue failure and first-passage failure are studied. Numerical examples are given.