A Methodology to Enable Automatic 3D Routing of Aircraft Electrical Wiring Interconnection Systems

Harness 3D routing in aircraft Electrical Wiring Interconnection System (EWIS) design is very complex because of both the intrinsic complexity of EWIS and the increasing number of design constraints. The complexity hinders the improvement of the design efficiency and makes the design error prone. Considering that many harness components are selected from catalogues and the design work is largely repetitive and mostly rule based, there are many opportunities to automate a significant part of the design process. Nevertheless, none or very limited solutions to automate the 3D routing have been found. Aiming for the automation of harness 3D routing, in this research, an innovative approach has been proposed that models and solves the 3D routing problem as an optimization problem. The challenge to solve above optimization problem is that the number of design variables, namely the number of clamping points, is not known a priori. The number is actually an output of the 3D routing. In order to handle this challenge, a two-step, hybrid optimization strategy has been devised. The first step, called Initialization, generates a preliminary harness definition using a road map based path finding method without knowing the number of design variables. The second step, called Optimization uses conventional optimization method to refine the preliminary harness definition while satisfying all design constraints. This approach has been implemented into a software application and several cases have been executed to validate the system functionality. The results have demonstrated that the tool is capable of handling cases of representative complexity and design constraints and deliver 3D harness models in full automation.