The optimisation of spot-weld positions for vehicle design by using hybrid meta-heuristics

Digital engineering is considered to be a powerful technology for improving the competitive power of products. Optimal design is an especially important technology. Products that have a competitive power usually have core technologies in design and manufacturing fields. Spot-weld technology, such as the positions and number of spot-welds on the white-body, indicates the technological level of an automotive company. This technology is a typical core technology. In this paper, a meta-heuristic method is proposed, an integer optimisation method on the discrete type, by using hybrid meta-heuristics for vehicle design. The proposed method is applied to some benchmark functions to check its performance, and it is shown that it improves the computational cost and convergence up to the optimal solution. Furthermore, the paper deals with the optimisation of spot-weld positions by the proposed method for aidingthe core technology of the vehicle design. The effectiveness of the proposed method is discussed through optimisation of benchmark functions and spotweld positions.