Combining tire-wear and braking control for aeronautical applications

In ground vehicles, tire consumption is in general mainly due to the mileage covered, and in fact the life span of tires, at least in common situations, is rather long. In the aeronautical context, and for aircraft in particular, instead, tire consumption plays a crucial role in determining the maintenance costs. This is due to the fact that, in aircraft braking, nearly all maneuvers activate the anti-skid controller, which remains in use for long time intervals. In ground vehicles, instead ABS systems are usually active for short time intervals which cover a part of the braking maneuvers only. Thus, tire consumption in the automotive context is usually studied under constant speed assumptions. In this work, we formulate a tire consumption models that encompasses explicitly the wheel acceleration/deceleration dynamics, and we show that tire wear can be directly related to the anti-skid controller parameters. Based on this, a sensitivity analysis of tire-consumption versus braking performance is carried out, showing that the braking control problem can be reformulated as a tire consumption regulation one.