TransOVM
Advanced Design Automation for Management of Options and Variants in Electrical Wiring Harness Designs
Highlights
- Two tools in one - it provides a Feature Manager for creation and management of a product program option list, and an OV Manager for managing wiring harness families and levels and the options they support.
- Captures complete product line option list.
- Options tied to wiring harness content.
- Easy to use spreadsheet format for harness-by-harness content definition.
- Simple On/Off visualization technique automates de-population of maximum content wiring harnesses to create new wire harness levels.
- Child wire harnesses dynamically linked to max-complexity harnesses.
- Combines a wiring harness program management tool with a powerful top-level wiring harness design tool.
- Greatly reduces manual creation and maintenance of individual wiring harness design levels.
- Automates the creation of the bill of material (BOM) for each wiring harness.
Product Overview
TransOVM works in conjunction with TransCable, and TransLayout to automate the management of wiring harness content for an entire product program. Wiring design engineers and program managers use TransOVM to document and design the complete option and variant of the electrical distribution system of a product. All options and variants for all the wiring harnesses can be managed from this interface. Using TransOVM's spreadsheet format, each wiring harness is dynamically linked to the options it supports and the wiring content of that option. Using this dynamic linking the design manager can create new wiring harnesses simply by turning off options, and running the harness generation routine. View Datasheet.
Target Market
TransOVM is the best choice for companies that need to design many different electrical distribution design configurations for a single product. The number of options and add-on design features usually drives this multitude of combinations. For products such as automobiles and airplanes, the use of TransOVM, in conjunction with the rest of Mentor Graphics's comprehensive electrical design environment, will have a significant impact on time-to-market and engineering costs.
Design Scenario
The Feature Manager is used to create a list of feature families and option tags, which apply to a particular product program. Starting from a list of all possible families and tags (the Global Option List), the user selectively removes those that are not used by (or do not affect the electrical content of) the product program. The resulting program-specific list is used within TransCable's Option Editor as well as OV Manager to ensure that option tags are used consistently throughout the process. (TransCable is Mentor Graphic's schematic capture tool.).
The OV Manager is employed by the user to capture the interaction of features with harnesses and product configurations. For each harness family, the tool will record which variant families are "complexity drivers" and which other feature families affect the harness build levels. Every level of each harness family can then be captured together with information about which features it supports. Similarly, particular vehicle configurations can be stored and later used to filter either schematic or layout data for documentation, design checks, and analysis.
These option assignments are then used to generate de-populated wire harness levels of the maximum complexity harnesses. The initial maximum complexity wiring is designed in TransLayout. (TransLayout is the Mentor Graphics 2D product design tool where the wiring design is synthesized.)
Option Lists
The available options are defined by the customer. This superset of product options can be the same for a wide range of products. Using this Global Option List, each product program selects the set of options that is right for that program. New options can be easily added to the Global Option List.
The TransDesign Tool Suite
- TransOVM is designed to work with the other tools in Mentor Graphic's TransDesign tool suite.
- TransCable is used to create the schematic diagrams for the product.
- TransLayout is a whole product design tool that creates the complete electrical distribution system design in one place.
- TransOVM is linked to all these tools and their design data. This integrated approach provides a self-documenting complete design environment.