Tire and road wear are a major source of emissions of nonexhaust particulate matter (PM) and make up the largest share of microplastics in the environment. To reduce tire wear through numerical optimization of a vehicle's suspension system, fast simulations of the representative usage of a vehicle are needed. Therefore, this contribution evaluates if instead of a full simulation of a representative test drive, only specific driving maneuvers resulting from a clustering of the driving data can be used to predict tire wear. As a measure for tire wear, the friction work between tire and road is calculated. It is shown that enough clusters result in negligible deviations between the total friction work of the full simulation and the cluster simulations as well as between the distributions of the friction work over the tire width. The calculation time can be reduced to about 1% of the full simulation.

In the industry 4.0 era, there is a growing need to transform unstructured data acquired by a multitude of sources into information and subsequently into knowledge to improve the quality of manufactured products, to boost production, for predictive maintenance, etc. Data-driven approaches, such as machine learning techniques, are typically employed to model the underlying relationship from data. However, an increase in model accuracy with state-of-the-art methods, such as deep convolutional neural networks, results in less interpretability and transparency. Due to the ease of implementation, interpretation and transparency to both domain experts and non-experts, a rule-based method is proposed in this paper, for prognostics and health management (PHM) and specifically for diagnostics. The proposed method utilizes the most relevant sensor signals acquired via feature extraction and selection techniques and expert knowledge. As a case study, the presented method is evaluated on data from a real-world quality control set-up provided by the European prognostics and health management society (PHME) at the conference’s 2021 data challenge. With the proposed method, our team took the third place, capable of successfully diagnosing different fault modes, irrespective of varying conditions.