BAT-NO: A Boundary-Condition-Aware Transformer Neural Operator for Crashworthiness Prediction of Vehicle Components
cs.LG
Submitted: 2026-10-02
Updated: 2026-10-02
Code: https://github.com/camlab-ethz/rigno
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
The gist: High-fidelity finite-element simulations provide accurate crashworthiness predictions, but their cost limits iterative design exploration.
Terminology
Abstract
High-fidelity finite-element simulations provide accurate crashworthiness predictions, but their cost limits iterative design exploration. Deep learning surrogates can reduce this cost, but many component-level models are developed under a single prescribed boundary condition, limiting generalisation to boundary variations. This work proposes a Boundary-Condition-Aware Transformer Neural Operator (BAT-NO) for autoregressive prediction of transient displacement fields and scalar crashworthiness responses under variations in geometry and boundary conditions. A B-pillar simulation framework evaluates generalisation across variations in geometry, impact position and velocity, and support stiffness. BAT-NO combines recurrent mesh processing with latent-grid Fourier operator processing. Boundary-condition information is transferred to the latent grid through a hybrid local--global mechanism. Slice-based attention models interactions among physically related regions, while direct boundary-to-grid projection preserves local spatial structure. Across the validation sets for the shape-only, shape-and-loading, and shape-loading-boundary cases, BAT-NO achieves the lowest mean final-step mean nodal Euclidean displacement error among the evaluated baselines. In the most challenging case, it reduces the mean error by 32.6% relative to the second-best model. Hyperparameter tuning reduces the validation error from 0.451 to 0.269 mm, with a comparable error of 0.267 mm on 300 unseen test simulations sampled within the investigated design space. An attention-based scalar decoder jointly predicts six response trajectories with a mean relative error of 2.46%. Most derived crashworthiness indicators have median errors below 3%. These results show that explicit local and global boundary-condition representations improve crashworthiness prediction over expanded component-level design spaces.
Sources
- MultiScale MeshGraphNets
- X-MeshGraphNet: Scalable Multi-Scale Graph Neural Networks for Physics Simulation
- Neural Operator: Graph Kernel Network for Partial Differential Equations
- Mask-Morph Graph U-Net: A Generalisable Mesh-Based Surrogate for Crashworthiness Field Prediction under Large Geometric Variation
- GeoTransolver: Learning Physics on Irregular Domains Using Multi-scale Geometry Aware Physics Attention Transformer
- High-Fidelity Industrial Crash Dynamics Prediction via Geometry-Aware Operator Learning with Memory-Efficient Low-Rank Attention
- MeshGraphNet-Transformer: Scalable Mesh-based Learned Simulation for Solid Mechanics
- Crash Assessment via Mesh-Based Graph Neural Networks and Physics-Aware Attention
- CarCrashNet: A Large-Scale Dataset and Hierarchical Neural Solver for Data-Driven Structural Crash Simulation
- Geometry-Informed Neural Operator Transformer
- EqGINO: Equivariant Geometry-Informed Fourier Neural Operators for 3D PDEs
- Transolver-3: Scaling Up Transformer Solvers to Industrial-Scale Geometries
- Imposing Boundary Conditions on Neural Operators via Learned Function Extensions
- Geometry Aware Operator Transformer as an Efficient and Accurate Neural Surrogate for PDEs on Arbitrary Domains
- Perceiver IO: A General Architecture for Structured Inputs & Outputs
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