Patent Document ID: 7571084
Application ID: 11185923
Patent Status: 1

Claim One:
1. A method of a vehicle design system for analyzing constraints on parameters of a vehicle model, the vehicle design system including a user interface and a display device to display a catalog of exemplars from which a user may select exemplar input and at least one engineering criteria having a plurality of criteria values from which a user may select criteria values, the method comprising: providing a morphable vehicle model generated from exemplar input, wherein providing a morphable vehicle model includes selecting a plurality of exemplar vehicle models from the catalog of exemplars that are mixed together using a statistical process to combine the exemplar models into the morphable vehicle model; providing a plurality of selectable features on the display device for manipulating the morphable vehicle model that allows a user to select a particular selectable feature to manipulate only that feature of the morphable model by moving a pointer on the feature on the display, and wherein selecting the particular selectable feature causes the display to display a cluster of points on the morphable model that define a space of the selected feature that includes the position of the selected feature of all of the exemplar models that are combined to form the morphable vehicle model; selecting a first engineering criteria value from the plurality of criteria values, said first engineering criteria value being a functional operation of the vehicle design; and evaluating the morphable model with respect to the first criteria value to generate numerical output.