Abstract Titanium alloys tubes are largely used to manufacture structural parts and piping elements that work at high temperature in many applications of transport industry, thanks to their high strength-to-weight ratio and excellent corrosion resistance. Among the available manufacturing methods, tube rotary draw bending is the most promising to achieve challenging shapes with high level of accuracy and process robustness, even if defects, such as wrinkling, over thinning, distortion of the cross-sections and springback, are still critical to be controlled. At the same time, titanium alloy tubes can be hardly shaped at room temperature due to their high yield strength and low ductility. The use of temperature-assisted processes might allow overcoming the above-mentioned limitations, but, at now, such processes have not been investigated in depth. In this context, the paper aims at investigating by numerical simulations the effects of selective heating in the rotary draw bending of thin-walled titanium alloy tubes. A numerical model of the process was developed to investigate different heating strategies and process temperatures. The obtained results show that selective heating is promising and capable to influence the quality of the bent tubes.