Computer Aided Engineering (CAE) is widely utilized in automotive industries since its performance has been improved in ten years. CAE makes it possible to quantitatively estimate a variety of automotive performance, and to propose an alternative idea to improve it. Most automotive designers, however, cannot directly use CAE due to sophisticated operations require ring specific skills. In order to overcome this problem, a new concept of CAE, First Order Analysis (FOA), is proposed. In this paper, we discuss two optimization methods utilized in FOA. That is, first, the topology optimization method using beams is described. Second, the shape optimization based on the response surface method is explained. Finally, some prototypes of software are presented to confirm the methods presented here
