The main purpose of this article is to optimize the stiffness and damping parameters of suspension systems to improve the ride comfort of a coach by using the pseudo-excitation method (PEM) and the method of moving asymptotes (MMA). The finite element model of the coach under investigation has 1778 degrees of freedom. The surface roughness of the highway is regarded as a spatial stationary random process, which is accurately transformed into the superposition of a series of deterministic pseudo-harmonic surface unevennesses by using PEM. By doing so, the proposed method considerably simplifies the solution of the vibration equations, the derivation of sensitivities of various random responses, and the execution of the optimization process. MMA is applied to solve the ride comfort optimization problem. The proposed method is well justified by the numerical example.
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