An Heuristic Approach Toward Innovative Tire Re-Design Through Advanced Technologies

Abstract

In the field of mobility and road transport, tires are components of a vehicle that play a decisive role in active safety. Monitoring tire conditions can affect different areas: Transport safety, optimization of cycles and maintenance costs and environmental protection. In fact, the tire wear check, possibly through the evaluation of the Remainig Useful Life (RUL), allows to meet many objectives: To ensure the necessary replacement of worn tires (safety target), to optimize the tire replacement cycles (maintenance target), avoid unnecessary early replacements (cost reduction target), reduce the amount of waste to be disposed of (environmental protection target). In this study two innovative methodologies, referable to technologies of Industry 4.0 field, are examined for the monitoring of tire wear: The first provides for direct monitoring through the use of "IoT" technology, the second provides for indirect monitoring through the use of "Big Data" technology. The scope and the limits of application are defined preliminarily, then the two methodologies are described according to the operating principle, in order to highlight merits and defects, finally a comparison of the two methodologies is provided. The proposed methodologies also allow to redesign the tires, developing new and safer products, with a flexible and integrated vision, which concerns the economic, social and environmental aspects from the perspective of managing the entire product life cycle (LCM - Life Cycle Management).