Electrical Wire Harness Design

The total length of electrical wires and cables can be as much as 3 to 4 kilometers (kms) in a car, 600 kms in a commercial aircraft, and up to 2500 kms in a cruise ship. Designing and managing this staggering amount of information present a huge challenge for electrical wire harness designers. The high price of electrical equipments and particular attention needed to meet certain performances and safety objectives have raised the importance of electrical system design as a key activity in product development.

Dassault Systèmes (DS)' solution for Electrical Wire Harness Design, supported by our CATIA brand, provides an integrated environment that enables collaborative design of electrical systems in context of a virtual product to ensure wire harness fit that minimizes downstream errors. Our solution is based on the RFLP (Requirement, Functional, Logical and Physical) approach that enables full traceability of information from requirement to the final product. Knowledge management is included in the solution to facilitate automated checks of the electrical wire harness design against predefined compliance rules and standards that must be followed throughout the design and manufacturing processes. DS PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) system enables efficient concurrent engineering for mechatronic parts so that engineers from various disciplines such as mechanical, electrical and systems can work collaboratively to optimize the electrical wire harness design. For more information, please download the CATIA Electrical Design brochure