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To stay competitive, new products require faster development time at low cost and good quality. Defense as well as commercial industries are forced to use analytical tools to stay competitive in a tough market. The use of simulation tools and approximation techniques in evaluating product performance during the early stages of the product development has a major impart on the product development efficiency, effectiveness, and lead time. Building physical prototypes of complex systems is expensive and it is difficult and time consuming to develop them. It is extremely beneficial to know as much as possible about the product performance and to optimize its dynamic characteristics before the first physical prototype is built.

The purpose of this paper is to develop the transfer function for the ride and handling performance for military tracked vehicle. This transfer function will be used in placed of the expensive physical hardware or simulation model for further study for robust design and optimization studies. Response Surface Methodology (RSM) approximation technique was used to develop the transfer functions. The RSM comprises of a group of statistical techniques for empirical model building and exploitation. RSM uses Design of Experiment (DOE) and multiple linear regression techniques for fitting of a response surface model that relates the output response to the design variables. The general form of the transfer function is a second order polynomial with unknown parameters to be identified. These unknown parameter were determined using the Central Composite Design (CCD) design of experiments.