ASSESSMENT OF THE OPTIMIZATION PROCEDURE FOR THE NON LINEAR SUSPENSION SYSTEM OF A HEAVY VEHICLES

Suspension systems of vehicles influence the overall performance of the vehicle by receiving the loads created by the road. In the past, researchers introduced many types of suspension systems studying them with the use of vehicle models, such as passive, active, semi-active etc. Many studies turned their attention to the optimization of the suspension systems, so as to facilitate the influence of design parameters in order to get the minimum or the maximum of an objective function. This allowed researchers to investigate ways to combine important parameters of a vehicle in the objective function, so as to achieve the optimum combination of its important parameters, such as the ride comfort and the road holding; the most common trade off in the automotive industry. In this paper, not only the efficiency of different optimization methods is investigated but also the efficiency of various fitness and objective functions so as to achieve the optimum result in the dynamical behaviour of a heavy vehicle model.