A comparison of recent metaheuristic algorithms for crashworthiness optimisation of vehicle thin-walled tubes considering sheet metal forming effects

In this paper, recent optimisation techniques have been used to improve crash performance of a thin-walled tube considering influence of the forming history. In the optimisation study, weight and amount of the energy absorption of the thin-walled tubes are chosen as objective function and constraint, respectively. Radial basis functions (RBFs) metamodelling technique was used to approximate the structural responses selected in crash and forming analyses. The performances of recent optimisation algorithms which are particle swarm algorithm, cuckoo search algorithm, gravitational search algorithm (GSA), hybrid gravitational search-Nelder Mead algorithm (HGSANM), league championship algorithm (LCA), firefly algorithm, bat algorithm, interior search algorithm (ISA) and imperialist competitive algorithm (ICA) were investigated to find the optimal thin-walled tube design. The lowest mass of the components is obtained at 1000 function evaluation number (FEN) using hybrid GSA.