I worked on a team of four students as a consultant for Goodyear. We worked for the company through the College of Wooster’s Applied Methods Research Experience (AMRE). AMRE matches students at the College with companies who need problems solved. Thus, we worked for advisors at Goodyear, but did most of our work at the College.

The main aim of this project was to identify and analyze the effects of some geolocational factors such as road roughness, road curvature, elevation change, weather, and traffic on tire tread wear. Goodyear provided us with data concerning the tire tread wear rates of different kinds of tires in several different zip codes. The majority of work done involved getting data for our factors, generating features from this data, and creating a model from these features. The main deliverable for the project was a model that explained the effect of the mentioned geolocational factors and enabled Goodyear to calculate a predicted tread wear rate for any region in the United States.