|
Powerful Wire Harness
Design Tool Improved
Altair Engineering Inc., launched an even more powerful version of its
advanced electrical wire harness design automation tool that strips months
off conventional harness design cycles.
The newest generation of Altair® HarnessLink™ includes an advanced routing
tool that streamlines the process of moving from design to manufacturing. Building
upon HarnessLink's core technologies — automated conversion of logical design
to physical design and automated generation and updating of schematics — the
HarnessLink Routing Module provides a complete 3-D workspace for wire routing.
With a push of a button, the design is built using the software's 3-D libraries and
project space.
After route paths or channeling locations are determined, another click places
all wires in the appropriate route paths, providing accurate wire lengths.
Additionally, HarnessLink's Routing Module provides the ability to flatten the
3-D harness and create scalable manufacturing drawings. Any guesswork is
virtually eliminated from the process, greatly reducing time and costs due to
trial-and-error prototyping.
Other enhancements include further integration with common third-party
schematic capture tools. New accounting and tracking processes for attached
parts within the design provide unprecedented power for integration and
overall design control.
"A great portion of conventional wire harness design is graphically driven,
labor intensive and very expensive," said Altair's Electrical Engineering Manager,
Keith Drittler. "HarnessLink automates this otherwise painstaking process by using
a database-oriented, rules-based design process. In addition to this significant
process improvement, the software reduces harness design time and increases
both accuracy and quality of design."
HarnessLink simplifies wire harness development by providing a combined
design tool and environment with seamless data flow between other engineering
tools, establishing an easy-to-use information exchange between electrical
engineering and mechanical engineering domains. Moreover, HarnessLink
provides cost accounting benefits from configuration management and
on-the-fly Bill-Of-Materials generation.
HarnessLink effortlessly generates any level of harness design, revision,
schematic capture, analysis or 3-D connectivity. Reuse of design data enables
maintenance of design integrity between database, 2-D, 3-D and simulation tools.
In addition, the use of IEEE format allows for easy compatibility with standard
CAD tools.
Altair HarnessLink promotes a data driven wiring system design process.
This "database-centric" approach reduces harness design time while increasing
accuracy and quality of design. Revisions and updates can be completed in one
to two weeks using HarnessLink, as opposed to the four to six months required
by conventional methods. It also is customizable to fit into any engineering
tool suite.
Additional HarnessLink features include:
• Simplified management of data, configuration, options, system-level
design information, and partial symbol
• Web entry forms for device data entry
• Automatic harness design and optimization tools
• Automatic schematic generation
• Design rule checks
In addition, Harness Link can examine multiple configurations of the same
design and compare new and original data, facilitating OEM and supplier
communication. By managing multiple vehicle configurations, HarnessLink
minimizes the number of unique harnesses to be developed.
According to Drittler, the ultimate goal is to minimize the number of
unique harnesses for a single configuration and maximize the number of
shared harnesses across multiple configurations, thus significantly reducing
the number of harnesses to be manufactured.
HarnessLink allows engineers to design for maximum complexity of
components while providing flexibility for individual and unique system packages.
Altair Engineering Inc. is a premier developer of product engineering
software for modeling, visualization, simulation optimization, and
process automation.
Anchored by the Altair® HyperWorks® engineering software suite,
Altair is among the world's leading providers of product engineering
consulting services, including design development, engineering,
prototype build, and physical testing.
With offices located throughout North American, Europe and Asia,
Altair is a global solutions provider.
For further information contact
Altair Engineering
1757 Maplelawn Drive
Troy, MI 48084-4603.
Phone (248) 614-2400
Fax (248) 614-2411.
Altair Engineering can be found on the Internet at www.altair.com
|
