Abstract
Lower control arm (LCA) is a part of chassis in automotive. Performances of LCA such as stiffness, durability and permanent displacement must be considered in design optimization. However it is hard to consider different performances at once in optimization because these are measured by different commercial tools like Radioss, Abaqus, etc. In this paper, firstly, we construct the integrated design automation system for LCA based on Matlab including Hypermesh, Radioss and Abaqus. Secondly, Akaike information criterion (AIC) is used for assessment of reliability of LCA. It can find the best estimated distribution of performance from limited and discrete stochastic information and then obtains the reliability from the distribution. Finally, we consider tolerances of design variables and variation of elastic modulus and achieve the target reliability by carrying out reliability-based design optimization (RBDO) with the integrated system.