A Systems Engineering approach to Occupant Protection System design and optimization through modeling and simulation

Occupant Protection Systems (OPS) have become a very important part of today’s automotive systems. The extensive government regulations and consumer information programs make the design and optimization of the OPS a complex and challenging task. A Systems Engineering (SE) approach is implemented throughout the OPS design and optimization process. The SE process includes customer requirements analysis, system concept design, system design, analysis and optimization, and system verification and validation. To fully evaluate the performance of the OPS and ensure its compliance of government regulations, the system needs to be tested in a large number of crash scenarios. Using physical tests alone to develop the OPS is cost-prohibitive. Therefore, computer modeling and simulation are utilized as one of the primary tools in the process. A frontal impact OPS design and optimization example is presented in the paper to demonstrate the process. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Syst Eng 8: 51–61, 2005 Regular Paper *Author to whom correspondence should be addressed (e-mail: [email protected]). Systems Engineering, Vol. 8, No. 1, 2005 © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.