Vehicle Crashworthiness Performance Prediction Through Fusion of Multiple Data Sources

This study aims to improve the prediction accuracy of the computer-aided engineering (CAE) model for crashworthiness performance evaluation at speeds beyond those defined by current regulations and public domain testing protocols. One way of achieving this is by integrating data from a few physical crash tests with the CAE data using machine learning models. In this study, two scenarios are investigated: (1) improving CAE model prediction accuracy using test data of a vehicle type that is the same as that of the CAE model; (2) improving CAE model prediction accuracy using test data from two different types of vehicles (e.g., two different sizes of SUVs). In the first scenario, a novel approach is proposed in the displacement domain (deceleration versus displacement) to enable data fusion to help recover the unmodeled physics in the CAE model. A nonlinear spring-mass model is used to simulate rigid-barrier vehicle frontal impact. A Gaussian process regression (GPR) model is then applied in conjunction with a Gaussian mixture model to capture the model bias of the nonlinear spring constant under a dynamic analysis scheme. In the second scenario, we propose a time-domain method (deceleration versus time) based on temporal convolutional network (TCN) and transfer learning. An initial TCN model is first trained by fusing CAE data with physical test data of the first vehicle type based on data augmentation. This data-augmented TCN model is then fine-tuned through transfer learning using CAE and test data of the second vehicle type. It leverages the domain-invariant representations of the two types of vehicles to enhance the CAE model prediction accuracy of the second vehicle type. Case studies are used to validate the proposed approaches and to demonstrate their efficacy in improving the prediction accuracy of the CAE models.