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For many years, requirements concerning bus passenger safety have been applied following certain standards in the United States, some European Countries, South Africa etc., and this concern has become an important topic also in Latin America. Those standards are in constant evaluation along the time, each year more and more adequate with the different kinds of accidents a bus structure can suffer (frontal impact, lateral impact, rollover…) and with the new methodologies to determine the bus structural behavior in those accidents (real reduced experiments, numerical simulations…). As an attempt to improve bus passenger safety regarding accidents, earlier important efforts have been made to apply those new standards in some Latin American countries. In this context, the present paper aims mainly to look into the behavior of a bus structure in a lateral rollover, following the concepts of the standard ECE R66 [1].

In this proposed work we intend to develop a methodology to assess the bus truck structure behavior when submitted to frontal crash using the simplified model of the truck and Genetic Algorithm. The simplified model consists of a set of flexible or rigid bars linked with non linear spherical and translational joints. The adjustment of the non linear joints is carried out by means of Shell Finite Element Model, Experimental Test or Analytical Expressions. Using this tool was possible to study different project alternatives to improve the performance of the truck structure of interurban busses when submitted to frontal crash.