The Yokohama Rubber Co., Ltd. has announced the successful development of a proprietary tire design support system leveraging eXplainable AI (XAI). This innovative system enhances the tire design process by providing critical information that aids in achieving desired tire features. The technology supplements the knowledge and experience of seasoned developers while also streamlining the design process for less-experienced staff, leading to faster development times and reduced costs.
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The new tire design support system is a significant advancement in Yokohama Rubber’s HAICoLab initiative—an acronym for “Humans and AI Collaborate” for digital innovation. Introduced in October 2020, HAICoLab aims to integrate human creativity and AI’s extensive data processing capabilities to foster digital transformation. The system employs SHAP (SHapley Additive exPlanations), a customised version of XAI, to identify features that enhance tire characteristics and provide developers with multifaceted indicators for adjusting these features.
XAI operates by analysing standard specifications and targeted characteristic values set by the development team. It then identifies the characteristics that need improvement and presents relevant features. Developers can interpret this information from multiple perspectives, modify specifications, and use an AI model to estimate characteristic values. This iterative process ensures that final specifications meet the targeted performance levels.
This new system not only accelerates the design process but also enables less-experienced developers to create high-quality tire designs efficiently. By clarifying the basis for each specification—such as the design factors that improve or maintain each characteristic value and their contribution rates—the collaboration between human insight and AI leads to new discoveries and inspirations. These innovations result in products with enhanced performance.
Yokohama Rubber plans to apply this system across a wide range of tire products and broaden HAICoLab’s applicability. HAICoLab aims to eliminate cognitive biases and incorporate diverse perspectives, combining AI’s data processing with human creativity. This framework has already facilitated the development of AI systems for predicting rubber property values and generating rubber compounds.
Through HAICoLab, Yokohama Rubber aspires to contribute to the realisation of "Society 5.0", an initiative promoted by the Japanese government to enhance people’s lives through innovative technologies like AI and IoT. The company’s commitment to leveraging AI for digital transformation was recognised in May 2024, when its R&D efforts with HAICoLab received accolades at the 36th annual Society of Rubber Science and Technology, Japan Awards.
