A thorough understanding of the denting behaviour is significant for the design of sandwich pipes. The aim of this paper is to investigate the denting behaviour of the sandwich pipe and propose a method for optimizing the cross-sectional configuration of the sandwich pipes against the denting force. The deformation process, load-displacement curve, equivalent plastic strain and energy dissipation characteristics of the sandwich pipe in the stages of dent generation and rebound are numerically examined. The subsequent parametric study shows that the hollow ratio, the thickness-to-radius ratios of the outer and inner tubes have significant impacts on the denting resistance and dent rebound performance of the sandwich pipes. The Pareto solution set for maximizing the denting resistance and minimizing the overall mass is obtained by using the non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm (NSGA-II) combined with response surface methodology. The obtained Pareto frontier is of guiding significance to the optimization design of sandwich pipes.