Alternative approaches circumventing the calculation of sensitivities comprise the following: The Graph and Heuristic-based Topology optimization (GHT) has been introduced to optimize the cross-section of profiles (Ortmann and Schumacher 2013) and has been extended by Beyer et al. ( 2020) to three-dimensional structures. Here, the topology of the structure is alternately changed according to heuristic rules based on expert knowledge and then optimized in terms of size and shape. Furthermore, Patel (2009) introduced Hybrid Cellular Automata (HCA) to crashworthiness optimization. The main idea here is to find a topology with uniform internal strain energy at the final state by a heuristic update-approach. The normalized density of each cell is updated as a function of the internal strain energy. Here, the internal strain energies are filtered by using a von Neumann neighborhood in the cellular automata paradigm. The material properties of each element are related to the density by using an extended SIMP approach for elasto-plastic materials. where \(\mathbf{f}(t)\), \({\mathbf{M}}_{\mathrm{NL}}\) , \({\mathbf{C}}_{\mathrm{NL}}\) , and \({\mathbf{K}}_{\mathrm{NL}}\) are the external dynamic force, the mass, the damping, and the stiffness matrix, respectively. Consequently, each equivalent static load \({\mathbf{f}}_{\mathrm{ESL}}