The OpenTire project is a non-commercial project that has three primary goals:
- Provide a library of open-source tire models in an easily accessible and useable format
- Provide a technical platform for collaborative tire model development
- Build a library of tire data and tire models available for use in research projects
The complexity involved in simulating tires can make it difficult to implement tire models in research and development studies. Firstly, turning equations in literature into software code can be a daunting task. Testing and validating an implementation is difficult and time consuming. Secondly, without a single open-source implementation of tire models collaborative development of tire models are difficult and slow. Lastly, getting access to tire data and tire models without large investments in testing is very difficult. As a result a significant part of tire and vehicle dynamics research is carried out using a tire model for 205/60R15 tire, which is readily available in literature.
Existing tire model implementations are generally built on dated programming languages which make integration with modern software tools difficult and inefficient. By utilizing a modern open-source scientific programming language (Python) along with modern collaborative tools (online code repositories) the threshold for entry into developing and utilizing tire models is significantly lowered.
The first release includes implementations of commonly used tire models along with implementation examples, benchmark studies and the first library of parameterized tire models.
Since the project start in late 2014, the project has received support from both academic and commercial contributors. More contributors are wanted to help define the roadmap for future development.