Abstract
Rear seat occupant protection has gained importance after the introduction of safety assessment for rear adult and child occupant by EuroNCAP. Design of restraint system for second-row occupants is always a tricky tradeoff due to competing requirements such as having a softer seat belt to have less load on child occupants, but this would potentially expose the heavier occupant to come in contact with vehicle interiors or front seats during certain impact scenarios. The objective of the study is to develop an optimization framework which can address multiple objectives and then use the framework to identify optimal second-row restraints system considering the various occupant sizes as well as multiple NCAP requirements using Computer Aided Engineering (CAE). Variations are considered in the restraint system design, an optimal combination of design variables are obtained using LS-OPT® (Optimization tool from Livermore Software Technology Corporation) for three different sizes of occupants in two crash severities. LS-OPT® in-built neural network radial basis function (RBF) and Genetic Algorithm were used for metamodeling and subsequent optimization.