Graph Extraction for Assisting Crash Simulation Data Analysis
This work addresses the need for improved design guidelines and recommendation systems in vehicle crash simulation analysis, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing graph-based methods for a specific domain.
The paper tackled the problem of analyzing crash simulation data by developing a method to extract directed weighted graphs from Computer Aided Engineering (CAE) data, focusing on load-path detection for vehicle crashworthiness, and demonstrated its utility in classifying and labeling simulations.
In this work, we establish a method for abstracting information from Computer Aided Engineering (CAE) into graphs. Such graph representations of CAE data can improve design guidelines and support recommendation systems by enabling the comparison of simulations, highlighting unexplored experimental designs, and correlating different designs. We focus on the load-path in crashworthiness analysis, a complex sub-discipline in vehicle design. The load-path is the sequence of parts that absorb most of the energy caused by the impact. To detect the load-path, we generate a directed weighted graph from the CAE data. The vertices represent the vehicle's parts, and the edges are an abstraction of the connectivity of the parts. The edge direction follows the temporal occurrence of the collision, where the edge weights reflect aspects of the energy absorption. We introduce and assess three methods for graph extraction and an additional method for further updating each graph with the sequences of absorption. Based on longest-path calculations, we introduce an automated detection of the load-path, which we analyse for the different graph extraction methods and weights. Finally, we show how our method for the detection of load-paths helps in the classification and labelling of CAE simulations.