A forward structure of a motor vehicle, particularly of a passenger car, includes a bumper cross member and an energy absorption element, particularly a foam-type impact absorbing element, disposed in front of the bumper cross member in the driving direction. A knowledge base of standard inputs that stores a plurality of categorized standard inputs may then be consulted. A node element set for the XML encoded dataset is determined, wherein each node element in the node element set is a discrete level of the hierarchical structure of the dataset.