Sensitivity Analysis of Vehicle Design Attributes in Frequency Domain

This paper presents a procedure for determining the sensitivity matrices of a vehicle dynamic system in the frequency domain as derivatives of the transfer function matrix with respect to system parameters. First and second order logarithmic sensitivity functions which possess normalized coefficients have been introduced to enhance analysis. The sensitivity analysis of amplitude-frequency characteristics on changes of selected parameters of a 3 degree-of-freedom vehicle handling model has been performed. It has been demonstrated that the general sensitivity measure proposed can be used to determine the combined influence of system parameters divided into groups such as design, environmental, driver, kinematic, etc., on the multi-parameter system response, prior to determining their order of influence within the groups.