Energy absorption of self-similar inspired multi-cell hexagonal tubes

•A user-friendly Abaqus/CAE plug-in tool is developed to rapidly estimate crashworthiness by inputting geometry parameters of these multi-cell tubes.•The offset and zoom can optimize the crashworthiness of the 0th order hybrid tubes.•The crashworthiness of first-order hybrid tubes can be enhanced by self-similar inspired double space-filling.•COPRAS and discrete optimization method are used for design and optimization.