TransOVM0 pages

TransOVM
Advanced Design Automation for Management of Options
and Variants in Electrical Wiring Harness Designs

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.

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 programspecific 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

www.mentor.com/harness

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.