  The work presented in this paper is part of the cooperative research project
AUTO-OPT carried out by twelve partners from the automotive industries. One
major work package concerns the application of data mining methods in the area
of automotive design. Suitable methods for data preparation and data analysis
are developed. The objective of the work is the re-use of data stored in the
crash-simulation department at BMW in order to gain deeper insight into the
interrelations between the geometric variations of the car during its design
and its performance in crash testing. In this paper a method for data analysis
of finite element models and results from crash simulation is proposed and
application to recent data from the industrial partner BMW is demonstrated. All
necessary steps from data pre-processing to re-integration into the working
environment of the engineer are covered.
