Surrogate modeling in the design optimization of structures with discontinuous responses with respect to the design variables - A new approach for crashworthiness design

Advances to computational technology have resulted in the reduction of computational effort for crashworthiness analysis, hence enabling structural design optimization. Surrogate modeling has been shown to further reduce computational effort as well as to smooth noisy responses. Crashworthiness optimization problems are, though, ill posed as they include nonlinear, noncontinuous and noisy responses. This violates the Hadamard conditions for well-posed problems and therefore the applicability of gradient-based algorithms is limited.