Optimized spike placement on tires with respect to low noise

Reducing noise is a growing subject of interest in the automotive industry, especially in tire manufacturing. When it comes to tires with spikes then the reduction of noise is an urgent issue. The placement of spikes on a given tire is combinatorial problem with constraints, since there are restrictions imposed by the traffic law as well as restrictions stemming from the production process. In this work we show that the application of heuristic optimization algorithms is usually not feasible because of the problem size that makes it impossible to find even one valid spike distribution with simple methods. We show three approaches based on the divide and conquer strategy that show promising results, one approach even including an optimization strategy in a genetic algorithms like style. As result our powerful algorithms are now used successfully in tire industry in order to produce valid and noise reduced spike distributions.