Electrical Quantified Wiring Integrity Check Tool to Verify and Validate the Wiring Harness 2D & 3D Designs 2016-01-1682

Electrical Power and Signal Distributions System in a vehicle is the most important among the Automotive Electrical and Electronic systems. In fact any electrical or electronic systems are realized and are physically formed by the Electrical Wiring Harness. This is a system in itself with the set of wires and connectors connecting various devices to feed the power and act as physical channels for signal transmission and serial data communication. Thus, the Electrical Wiring Harness becomes huge complicated systems in a vehicle. Because of the number of wires, cables and the specific connectivity requirement the design and development will become very difficult. Further, the complexity is manifold due to number of harnesses in a vehicle and different operating conditions in different zones of the vehicle.

The design and development of an Electrical Wiring Harness involves primarily the design of the electrical circuit. This is based on the vehicle architecture. Then these circuit designs are transformed into 2D and 3D Models in the final product design. With the ever increasing emphasis on product quality at every stage of the vehicle’s life cycle, care must be taken to maintain the integrity of the design. Design aspects such as point to point connection, color of the wires and size of the wires are maintained throughout the development process till the final design.

This paper discusses a method of automating the harness circuit integrity and cross validation process. This automation code is an application, which allows the user to perform as many integrity checks on multilateral design data. These integrity checks are performed within hours as compared to months of manual review and action process. The application ensures the thorough integrity check at par with the requirements. It generates actionable reports with color coding. This helps designers to eliminate the errors at very early stage of design cycle and helps to reduce the lead time for designing the Electrical Wiring Harness.