FRESH - From Electric Cabling Plans to Simulation Help
Overview
Background & policy context:
The industrialisation of an aircraft electrical harness relies almost entirely on manual methods. When changes are needed, wiring diagrams have to be checked manually and a new harness design process has to be started to integrate modifications. CAD (Computer Aided Design) exchanges are also very difficult in this field (due to hardware/software incompatibilities). To assess electric harness behaviour, simulation is very rarely used and existing symbol recognition methods are unsatisfactory.
FRESH proposed to design a specific and innovative recognition methodology to lead to an automatically generated system.
Objectives:
The main objectives of the project were:
- To convert electric wiring plans into Computer Aided Design wiring diagram language.
- To translate CAD-generated wiring language into a universal language.
- To adapt and improve available software to transfer wiring diagrams (in a universal language) into electrical harnesses.
- To simulate electrical harnesses' physical behaviour, and benefit from simulation verification and optimisation capabilities.
And as a consequence:
- Reduce electrical harness development costs.
- Produce an error-free intervention level.
- Reduce harness modification, maintenance and overhauling costs.
The project will yield:
- An automated system to recognise paper electrical wiring diagrams and to convert them into reconstructed numerical wiring information.
- Dedicated modules to convert the reconstructed wiring information into a language understandable by classical tools to generate the harness.
- A system to design, through computing, the geometric plan of the harness.
- A smart electrical harness simulation system to check the electrical validity of the wiring diagrams and harness.
Methodology:
FRESH comprised seven major Work Packages, without counting Work Package 0, which deals with project management.
- Work Package 1 dealt with specifications (selection of an example of a paper-wiring diagram as a basis of the research, ergonomic standards for targeted harness geographical plans and envelope boundaries of wiring and harness simulations).
- Work Package 2 addressed wiring diagram recognition (methodology for recognition).
- Work Package 3 dealt with the conversion of paper or CAD wiring diagrams into a universal language (PIVOT).
- Work Package 4 dealt with harness numerical geometric plans (to adapt and improve freeware to transfer wiring diagrams into electrical harness).
- Work Package 5 addressed wiring and harness simulation (by research on the algorithms and models to simulate the diagrams in a factual way).
- Work Package 6 dealt with the global automation system prototyping (a validated, fully automatic process for harness optimisation and smart maintenance).
- Work Package 7 dealt with dissemination and exploitation (to give general awareness on project results and to prepare the future industrial exploitation of project results).
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