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Special issue on the 4th International Tyre Colloquium

Ever since the first meeting in 1991, organised by Professor Pacejka at the Delft University of Technology, Tyre Colloquia have provided a platform for researchers and scientists from industry and academia to discuss and consolidate progress in the understanding and simulation of tyre–road–vehicle interactions. In particular, the 1st Tyre Colloquium focused on the steady-state shear forces and torque generating properties of the tyre. The 2nd Colloquium, organised by Professors Böhm and Willumeit at the Technical University of Berlin in 1997, primarily discussed transient tyre characteristics. With the development of increasingly sophisticatedmechatronic automobiles, the topics at the 3rd Tyre Colloquium (held at the Vienna University of Technology in 2004) ranged from tyre modelling to control aspects of vehicle dynamics. The event was organised by Professors Lugner and Plöchl, who also presented the first results of the international Tyre Model Performance Test. In 2015, the 4th Tyre Colloquium was held at the University of Surrey, Guildford, United Kingdom. In line with the tradition, the topics focused on current challenges related to modelling of tyres for vehicle dynamics analysis. Since the first Colloquium, the capabilities of simulating tyre–road–vehicle interactions have significantly advanced so that nowadays tyre forces and moments can be accurately modelled within experimentally tested conditions. Yet,many simulation challenges remain unsolved as tyre mechanics/dynamics is a complicated subject and a full understanding of the fundamental tyre–road interaction mechanisms is still missing. Today, driven by the use of high-fidelity simulation tools in the vehicle development process, one of the main issues is the accurate tyre behaviour prediction outside tested conditions to allow simulation of all possible facets of running characteristics. Also, considering the increasing connectivity of vehicles, the use of tyres as a real-time sensor offering chassis control systems direct access to tyre forces and road friction conditions is highly desirable and, at same time, very challenging. The 4th Tyre Colloquium focused on today’s challenges by discussing a wide range of topics, including tyre measurements and measurement techniques, application of tyre models to vehicle dynamics, determination of tyre model parameters, measurement and modelling of rubber friction, tyre–road contact simulation, and evaluation and verification of tyre models. This special issue includes a small selection of papers presented in April 2015. The contributions are organised as follows. The first paper by Gipser [1] provides a clear and structured account of the potential of predictive capabilities of a tyre model by exploring five different operating scenarios, such as running on very rough roads. The author demonstrates that physically consistent modelling allows instructive insights into complex tyre behaviour without the need of modelling every effect, while pointing out the limitations in terms of absolute accuracy due to the lack of detailed understanding of rubber–road friction. The second contribution by Wei et al. [2] further investigates the benefits of physically consistentmodelling by studying