KPI-Conditioned Generative Design of Automotive Hood Inner Panels: A Two-Stage Retrieval-Generation Pipeline with Surrogate-Based Performance Estimation

Abstract

An inner hood panel must meet a deflection target, stay below a stress limit, and hit a mass target. Machine-learned surrogates have made the forward direction, geometry to performance, fast and routine. The inverse direction, producing geometry from a stated requirement, remains largely unaddressed for industrial parts whose design space is organized into discrete topology families rather than a continuous parameterization. This work presents a two-stage pipeline for that inverse problem. A reachability stage determines which topology families can satisfy a given requirement vector. A conditional variational autoencoder then generates point-cloud geometry within a selected family, and a neural-operator surrogate estimates the performance of each candidate. The pipeline is built entirely from public data and freely available compute, and is deployed as an interactive tool. The pipeline works, with qualifications that are reported as primary findings rather than caveats. The surrogate is accurate in aggregate, but its error is comparable to the performance differences it is asked to discriminate, which bounds what can be claimed for any individual generated design. That ratio of surrogate error to within-class signal is argued to be the quantity that determines whether a pipeline of this kind can work at all.