Optimal design and applicability of electric power steering system for automotive platform

Abstract

The ongoing need for better fuel economy and lower exhaust pollution of vehicles has increased the employment of electric power steering (EPS) in automotives. Optimal design of EPS for a product family reduces the development and fabrication costs significantly. In this paper, the TOPSIS method along with the NSGA-II is employed to find an optimum family of EPS for an automotive platform. A multi-objective optimization problem is defined considering road feel, steering portability, RMS of Ackerman error, and product family penalty function (PFPF) as the conflicting objective functions. The results for the single objective optimization problems and the ones for the multi-objective optimization problem, as well as two suggested trade-off design points are presented, compared and discussed. For the two suggested points, performance at one objective function is deteriorated by about 1%, while the commonality is increased by 20%–40%, which shows the effectiveness of the proposed method in first finding the non-dominated design points and then selecting the trade-off among the obtained points. The results indicate that the obtained trade-off points have superior performance within the product family with maximum number of common parts.

Keywords

product family optimization / optimal platform design / NSGA-II / TOPSIS / electric power steering

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