Collaborative toolkit for crashworthiness research

Ensuring the safety of vehicle's occupants during a crash is of foremost importance during the vehicle design process. Computer modeling of crashworthiness decreases the design cost and empowers the designers to explore new concepts with more confidence that their final product would be feasible and would perform to design specifications. To capture the complexity of vehicle deformations in computer simulations, detailed models are necessary and, in general, require full utilization of available supercomputing resources. Due to the limited availability of supercomputing resources, the development of collaborative methods for crashworthiness research would allow for effective utilization of the computational and human resources, as well as permit researchers with different backgrounds, interests, and roles in the design and production system to actively participate in crashworthiness research. Development of Collaborative Problem Solving Environments for the ongoing crashworthiness research at Oak Ridge National Laboratory is presented in this paper.