Hankook Tire & Technology has developed a model to predict the properties of tire compounds using artificial intelligence (AI). The Virtual Compound Design (VCD) system is expected to reduce the compound development process by about 50% – a cycle that usually takes from six months to three years.
The tire maker said the VCD system uses technology that predicts the characteristics of compounds and draws the most optimal combination of the materials through artificial intelligence analysis, based on accumulated data, without real-world testing during the tire compound development.
In addition, the new development system operates within the cloud platform by creating a digital twin – a twin of real-life objects – repeating the process of reflecting results derived from virtual simulations into reality and affecting each other over reality and virtual reality to find improved results.
Tens of thousands of units of data have been analyzed through cloud computing platforms such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google’s TensorFlow, an artificial intelligence engine, continuing their evolution through machine learning.
Hankook Tire is planning to expand the technology to the entire process of developing tires – from material selection, design and tire testing, through to manufacturing including mass production.
The VCD system began as an internal research operation that has been accelerated by an agreement with the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, which began in early 2019.
