The design goals in tire development are manifold due to the requirements with respect to the structure and, sometimes, they are even contradicting. Moreover the physical (and chemical) behavior of the tire structure itself and its interaction with the environment, i.e. vehicle, pavement etc., is complex. In order to be able to investigate and understand the structural behavior, experiments – either real or virtual – are required. Virtual experiments, i.e. simulations, are suitable to supplement testing and to provide additional information. Modeling and simulation needs to be provided on different levels and complexities. It starts on the continuum level at the material point. Adequate constitutive models have to be provided which have predictive capabilities. The structure is assembled numerically from its components using appropriate finite elements. Moreover, the tire is designed in interaction with the vehicle and an interaction with the pavement might be of interest as well. Beyond the modeling of material and structure, an approach to describe the data used has to be defined. It could be chosen as an idealized, deterministic description or as an approach taking the uncertainty of data into account which depicts reality more closely. Optimization of the structure is usually done by experience and intuition of the designing engineer. Systematic mathematical procedures might support finding an optimum in an efficient and reliable manner.

The presentation will cover recent aspects of various fields starting from constitutive modeling, fracture and durability investigation of rubber and tires up to multiphysics, tire road interaction and optimization in order to give examples for the simulation chain for virtual product testing and product design.