Comparison of Performance of Predicting the Wear Amount of Tire Tread Depending on Sensing Information

Excessive tire wear can affect vehicle driving safety. While there are various methods for predicting the tire wear amount in real-time, it is unclear which method is the most effective in terms of the difficulty of sensing and prediction accuracy. The current study aims to develop prediction algorithms of tire wear and compare their performances. A finite element tire model was developed and validated against experimental data. Parametric tire rolling simulations were conducted using various driving and tire wear conditions to obtain tire internal accelerations. Machine-learning-based algorithms for tire wear prediction utilizing various sensing options were developed, and their performances were compared. A wheel translational and rotational speed-based (V and ω) method resulted in an average prediction error of 1.2 mm. Utilizing the internal pressure and vertical load of the tire with the V and ω improved the prediction accuracy to 0.34 mm. Acceleration-based methods resulted in an average prediction error of 0.6 mm. An algorithm using both the vehicle and tire information showed the best performance with a prediction error of 0.21 mm. When accounting for sensing cost, the V and ω-based method seems to be promising option. This finding needs to be experimentally verified.