Abstract
For a car manufacturer, seat comfort is an important attribute to differentiate themselves from the competitors. Engineering and development of seats to meet comfort requirement is subjective in nature. Seat comfort assessment currently followed would require tuning of seat prototypes based on comfort assessment rides by core comfort evaluators and collecting objective data like pressure map of the evaluators as well as other metrics. This makes it imperative for the car manufacturers to get it right during evaluation process so that cost and time for design changes at later stage in seat development can be reduced. The objective of this study is to present the potential of virtual benchmarking in objectifying the seat comfort pressure distribution which is currently subjective. So far, virtual benchmarking method has been applied in many other domains, not for evaluating the competitor seat comfort objectively. This study focuses on developing a Computer-Aided Engineering (CAE) based seat comfort benchmarking method that can be used for developing a seat that meets comfort requirements for an upcoming car.