Optimal Design of Tracked Vehicle Driving Dynamics Based on PSO and RMSTMM

To mitigate vibration during tracked vehicle operation, enhance crew comfort, and improve vehicle performance, this study proposes an optimized design for the track structure based on the Reduced Multibody System Transfer Matrix Method (RMSTMM) and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO). First, the tracked vehicle is modeled as a spatial multibody dynamic system composed of rigid bodies, rotational hinges, and prismatic hinges using RMSTMM. Subsequently, the structure parameters of the track wheel system (including driving wheels, engaged wheels, road wheels, and support rollers) are selected as design variables, with the root mean square (RMS) of the vehicle body’s centroid vertical acceleration defined as the optimization objective. The results demonstrate that the optimized design achieves a 10.80% reduction in the full-process RMS of centroid vertical acceleration when the vehicle traverses Class D pavement at 30 km/h. These findings validate that the RMSTMM-based dynamic optimization method effectively reduces vibration levels in tracked vehicles, providing a novel technical approach for performance design and enhancement of such vehicles.