Wire harnesses include a bundle of insulated conductors bound together, for example, by helically wound tape to produce an arrangement that is compact and easy to manage. Wire harnesses may be used in a variety of applications to electrically interconnect components of a product. For example in an automobile, a harness may allow connections to the dash board, head lights, battery, tail lights, etc.
Design of a wire harness takes place in both three-dimensions and two-dimensions. A three-dimensional (3D) mechanical computer aided design (MCAD) system is used to hold the geometry definition of the harness. However, much of the actual design, engineering, pre-production, preparation of costs, and bills of material are all completed in a separate two-dimensional (2D), electrical computer aided design (ECAD) system. Typically, the geometric harness data may be exported from the 3D system to the 2D system, which engineers use to finish the design. For example, the 2D system has a component library and tools needed to solve logical (rather than geometrical) problems.
It is desirable to obtain 2D drawings of the system, which are used for a variety of purposes including creating a layout of an assembly board used to manufacture the wire harness. For this reason, MCAD systems generally include a “mechanical flattening” program for converting the 3D geometric harness data to 2D. Such flattening programs take into account mechanical constraints, such as the flexibility of the wires and torsional constraints, in producing the 2D image. However, these mechanical flattening programs are very slow and error prone.
Another option to obtain a 2D drawing is to export the 3D data to a 2D system and perform the flattening in the 2D system. Indeed, such systems exist, but only remove the Z component of the 3D data. The result is that there are many overlapping nodes and branches that hamper the visualization of the harness in 2D. Such overlaps may be manually adjusted, but this also is a slow process and does not provide ideal results.
Thus, it is desirable to produce a flattening system that generates a clean and esthetically pleasing view of a harness in 2D.