Target Reduction and Balancing Using System Norms: Application to Vehicle Design

A new approach for cascading system-level design targets to performance targets for the different subsystems is proposed and applied to a vehicle example. The proposed approach aims at reducing the total number of targets needed to quantify the performance of an engineering system and at systematically balancing these targets among its constituent subsystems. The vehicle example consists of three subsystems that transfer suspension forces to the cab in a lightweight truck. The three vehicle subsystems are connected in a general feedback configuration. The proposed approach significantly reduces the number of targets used to quantify the vehicle system performance. In addition the cascaded targets are systematically balanced among the different subsystems to deliver the desired system performance.