Patent ID: 7369966

Claim:
A method to analyze fatigue damage values of wheels each to be installed at a number of axle positions on a vehicle, comprising: (a) simulating installations by randomly determining the axle positions of each wheel on the vehicle; (b) determining at each of the axle positions for each wheel a fatigue damage value for each of a plurality of critical locations at the wheel during an installation; (c) storing the fatigue damage values of the critical locations for each installation; (d) summing the respective retained fatigue damage value for each critical location to determine a respective total fatigue damage value; (e) repeating (a), (b), (c) and (d) a number of times to obtain at each of the critical locations a distribution of total fatigue damage values; and (f) determining whether or not at least a subset of the total fatigue damage values at each of the critical locations exceeds a respective threshold total fatigue damage value.