Applying a mathematical approach to improve the tire retreading process

Problem of waste treatment is very important for environment and the share of tires in this scope is high. The aim of this paper is to analyse retreading as one very interesting way of tires' treatment. In practice, firms involved with commercial vehicles exploitation have to decide whether to retread used tires or not, depending on the number of retreadings of used tires and travelled distances after each retreading. An approach based on Bayesian networks is proposed as a tool for decision making support in tire retreading process. Analysis is performed on database of tires' exploitation from a company of public passenger transportation and the statistical results are used as inputs to the proposed model. The results obtained according to the proposed model provide a good basis when it comes to making a decision whether to retread or not a used tire. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.