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Nowadays, the automobile industry is booming and the number of vehicles is proliferating while the road traffic environment is also deteriorating. Therefore, attention should be paid to the protection of vulnerable road users in traffic accidents, such as pedestrians. In order to reduce the pedestrians’ head injury in collision accidents, in this study, the vehicle engine hood which responds significantly to head injuries was taken as the design object, so as to put forward a new optimization design process. The parameters of the hood’s main components, manufacturing materials and structural scheme were considered to carry out simultaneous optimization from various aspects such as pedestrian protection and hood stiffness.

Computer modeling and simulation have significantly facilitated the efficiency of product design and development in modern engineering, especially in the automotive industry. For the design and optimization of car models, optimization algorithms usually work better if the initial searching points are within or close to a feasible domain. Therefore, finding a feasible design domain in advance is beneficial. A data mining technique, Iterative Dichotomizer 3 (ID3), is exploited in this paper to identify sets of reduced feasible design domains from the original design space. Within the reduced feasible domains, optimal designs can be efficiently obtained while releasing computational burden in iterations. A mathematical example is used to illustrate the proposed method. Then an industrial application about automotive structural optimization is employed to demonstrate the proposed methodology. The results show the proposed method’s potential in practical engineering.