Save costly development time by optimizing the physical design of wire harnesses & cable systems in context of the complete product and by generating high quality manufacturing documents

Electrical 3D & Manufacturing Engineer (ELM) covers the physical design of wire harness and cabling systems within the Digital Mock Up of a product. It is part of the complete integrated Electrical process and has tight synchronization capabilities with the Systems Schematic Engineer role (TIC).

It also covers the harness manufacturing for formboard preparation and harness manufacturing drawings generation.

Short Description

Save costly development time by optimizing the physical design of wire harnesses & cable systems in context of the complete product and by generating high quality manufacturing documents:

- Synchronize electrical schematic to 3D design and optimize the harness routing in context of the complete product

- Route 3D wires and cables to obtain exact bundle diameters and wire/cable lengths

- Generate of annotated scaled drawings and high quality manufacturing documents with automatic processes

- Strategic & optimized harness layout arrangement for formboard preparation

- 3D Change impact analysis & generation of Bill of Material

- 3D Design change reflection to all existing manufacturing documents

- Facilitate harness installation by limiting torsion earlier in the process and anticipating manufacturing constraints

- Create Tolerance Annotations directly in the 3D for a complete model description

Electrical 3D Physical Design 

The Electrical 3D Physical Design capabilities deliver a process-specific solution for designing physical wire harnesses. This solution is driven by logical specifications (schematics) and is integrated with harness manufacturing preparation. By delivering a realistic simulation for 3D wire harness packaging in an integrated environment, this powerful solution reduces design time and increases the overall quality of large-scale electrical systems. It also enriches the design through realistic deformation of flexible harnesses by taking into account environmental conditions like gravity.

Electrical Manufacturing Engineering

Once the 3D Design of Wire Harnesses in the context of their complete product is finalized, the next step is the Wire Harness Manufacturing. 3DEXPERIENCE platform provides an application enabling the automatic generation of manufacturing documents, including annotated drawings, all needed reports and on scale formboards.

Dedicated automatic processes covering all use cases:

• Documentation for subcontractors

Documentation process addresses companies who work with subcontractors for the harness manufacturing step and who need to provide them all manufacturing information.

• Automatic generation of annotated and scaled manufacturing drawing to be transmitted to subcontractors, including reports according to company standards

• Automatic generation of harness dimensions in the drawing documents but manual modification is still available

• Formboard for harness manufacturers (harness manufacturing on jig board)

Formboard process addresses customers who manufacture their own harnesses.

• Automatic formboard generation: harness flattening and alignment on jig boards

• Automatic on scale formboard drawing generation which can be sticked on the board

• Harness flattening taking into account harness backbone definition, potential loops to open and formboard tables potentially already installed

• Automatic harness backbone path computation and display in pink in 3D

• Possibility to add special flatten behavior for some branches to comply with manufacturing constraints and to respect curvature/twist on very rigid segments

• 3D Manufacturing for rigid harness manufacturers

The final process is the 3D Manufacturing, addressing customers manufacturing very rigid harnesses. The process generates a torsion-free layout in which the tangency at branch junctions is kept.

• Automatic generation of harness with limited torsion

• Partial flattening for complex rigid harnesses

• Creation of 3D manufacturing information taking into account the curvature and allowed torsion of the bundle segments

• Critical functionality for aero engine harnesses

Electrical Manufacturing automatic processes all offer:

• A robust validation of the data to process & new checks performed in the behind scene

• Information about the processed data : dashboarding with advanced reports for each step and cross-highlight capability

• A high-level of user interface targeting to minimize user interactions but manual modification is still available

• Better integration in data setup and preferences minimizing preparation steps for users and allowing centralized administration of company rules

  • Sheet template and GVS file for documentation process

  • Backbone identification criteria, board dimensions and offset from plane for formboard process

Benefits

Saving Preparation/Installation Time & Reducing Costs

• Generating high quality manufacturing documents faster with automatic processes

• First Time Right Harness Production and flexibility in harness manufacturing thanks to a real time 3D design change reflection to all existing manufacturing documents

• Complexity Management in harnesses through comparison tools easing harness element identification

• Facility in Harness Installation with Torsion management

• Rapid return on investment with elimination of physical harness mock ups

Harness Quality Standardization

• Manufacturing Documents Delivery with detailed and relevant information through customization according to company standards

• Engineering Validation through length tolerances and business rules to respect manufacturing constraints directly in the flattening

• Related to the Drafting application enabling multiple view placement on manufacturing documents, for instance 3D view

Facilitating Collaboration

• Efficient project management through a multi-disciplinary and collaborative platform

• Perfect integration into the whole CATIA Electrical Process

• Integration with external tools and platforms for data continuity and safety

Highlights

3D Master Design

Leverage Model Based Design through fast 3D Tolerancing adoption for product engineering

• Allow a full Tolerancing of the product

• The Semantic Tolerancing advisor guides the designer to be compliant with standards such as ISO, ANSI / ASME and JIS

• Eases the 3D definition understanding with a cross-highlight of the 3D geometry and related annotations

• Protects the company know-how and Intellectual Property (IP) thanks to 3D data filtering capabilities

• Exports 3D master definition to STEP format

• Improves the productivity for part’s family by an easy duplication of 3D tolerances and annotation

• Re-uses any 2D definition to support conceptual design in 3D

Flattened Harness Layout Optimization

Harness alignment on Formboard tables

• Strategic & Optimized Formboard tables Placement. The harness flattening fits the formboard tables perfectly in an optimized and centralized position with the backbone on the center. Backbone extremities never exceed formboard table’s borders.

Strategic & Optimized Harness Layout Arrangement for formboard preparation

• Dedicated commands to manage harness layout bundle segments: rotate, mirror, roll, arrange junction, straighten and scale the harness layout by direct interactive manipulation of the wire harness branches.

• Powerfull, Intuitive and easily used 3D manipulators enable the efficient harness layout arrangement in just a few mouse clicks.

• Precision in the operations scaling

3D Change impact analysis

Highlight of the elements between the harness data and the corresponding flattened data & Generation of a BOM.

• Manufacturing Information Supply : Automatic Bill of Material Generation

• Real Time Design Change Reflection : Highlight capability between harness components and flattened components

• Wire Harness Product Complexity Management : View facility for Users and Easier identification of harness components

3D Change Management

Synchronization between 3D and flattened data for Change Management

• Real Time Design Change Reflection

  • Automatic Transfer of 3D harness design changes, to the existing harness flattening and to the manufacturing documents

  • Version Management: Ensuring efficient design change process iterations & maximizing the Reuse

• Semi-Automatic process where User is still an actor

  • More information about the processed data : advanced reports for each synchronization process step with a high-level of UI and cross-highlight capability between 3D and Flattened data

  • Multiple design scenarios for systematic comparison and optimal design

  • Simulated synchronization enabling the user to validate or not the futur results as a decision maker

  • Capability to identify the impacted formboard tables

  • Multiple view facility 

• Critical Harness Backbone Management

  • Automatic path computation for backbone definition and display in pink in 3D

  • Backbone shape retention thanks to the anchor roll selection

  • Previsualization of the future backbone for an optimized anchor roll selection

Torsion Management

Torsion limitation earlier in the process to increase the feasibility level in manufacturing and during installation & to decrease potential errors

• A moving frame all along the backbone for characteristic points detection like supports, junctions

• Pre-visualization of the flattening orientation in the 3D with orientation vectors

• Reframe On capability on both harness and flatten data

• Ambiguity zone graphic view for torsion limitation

• Ambiguity status of selected segments

• Mirror or Rotate actions proposed only for the segments you can decide the side

Tolerances & Annotations directly in the flattening

Taking into account manufacturing constraints directly in the flattening definition, by applying length tolerances and annotations on harness branches

• Object Parametrization: right cable length between each part

• Annotations on the harness layout, automatically transferred to the Manufacturing Drawing.

• Complete product definition with 3D Annotations and reduce errors for tolerances and drawing interpretation

Manufacturing Documents Customization with GVS file

Automatically generated and customized texts, symbols, information tables, pin maps and reports according to company standards.

• Advanced Automation Scripts

• Automatic Generation of customized Material lists, Reports and Information tables

• Predefined view style

• Predefined annotations and symbols by object type

• Possibility to add customized attributes from a text table

 Report Generation

Generating high quality documents using the power of the 3DEXPERIENCE Platform

• Generation of multiple formats high quality documents (Word, RTF, Excel, PDF, HTML, XML, CSV)

• Fully integrated into the 3DEXPERIENCE Platform

  • Single source of truth

  • Access rights

  • Product Life Cycle Management features for templates and documents management

• Extraction and manipulation of information from the 3DEXPERIENCE Platform based on business Templates

• Reuse the same generation template as many time as required

Drafting Template Design

Increasing Drawing productivity by delivering extended drafting capabilities.

• Smart Annotations, Views, Sheets, Title blocks associative with templates

• Easy instantiation and synchronization of all templates

• Multi view generation and update based on templates and rules for color filling functionalities

• Use of customer standards

• Dedicated Bill of Material and template reports