A Novel Topological Method for Automated and Exhaustive Wire Harness Design

Abstract

The current practice of manual wire harness design is labor-intensive, time-consuming, costly, and error-prone. In this paper, we present a methodology for completely automated wire harness design. We propose a topological approach that yields all the possible electrically admissible but topologically distinct harness system layouts that can be used to connect the specified terminals. Each generated layout represents a possible harness design. For layout generation, the proposed method utilizes the so-called routing graphs associated with the closed surfaces bounding the product. The developed methods are able to handle both — (1) On-Surface routing, when the wires are required to be constrained to the surface of the product, and (2) In-Air routing, when in addition to the surface the wires are also allowed to be embedded in product’s ambiance. For the final geometric embedding of the generated harnesses, we present an optimization-based methodology that determines the optimum lengths of the segments over which the wires should be bundled together. The results presented demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed approach through multiple realistic examples.