Cost Reduction of Electric Powertrains by Platform-Based Design Optimization

Developing production-ready electric powertrains for vehicles within short development times is challenging-especially in the context of platform definition and exploitation. The present work suggests a design method for electric axle drives that is able to consider multiple concurrent electric powertrain design problems and reduce the system costs by utilizing commonalities between the single designs. The underlying multi-design optimization makes use of commonalities to an extent, which is most favorable for the overall system optimality. The method is applied to a case study involving two concurrent design problems and commonalities in the gearbox bearing selections are considered in the cost calculation. The results show a significant cost reduction potential by application of the proposed method.