This projects aims to develop design automation in product development. Design automation causes increase in producibility and decrease in product cost and manufacturing lead time.
The study at hand is proposed to provide a new method and to introduce procedure to the design of wiring pattern for a car seat heater for Kongsberg Automotive, KA. KA is a Norwegian company and a global provider of engineering, design, and manufacture for seat comfort, driver and motion control systems, fluid assemblies, and industrial driver interface products. The method that currently is used in the company to create a wiring pattern is neither sufficient enough nor automated.
In order to design the wiring pattern, at first procedure is handled by the designer. Secondly, car seat heater 2D layout is imported and then, the dimensions of the elements are defined as constraints. Then VBA codes are opened and the program is run. The result will be a wiring pattern in different 2D layouts. To make the design process easier, we have modeled five different layouts; wiring pattern of one element, two elements, three elements, five elements (with two back sides) and one element trapezoidal 2D layout.
The algorithm written in VBA (Visual basic for application) creates the pattern according to the dimensions of the elements which are used as inputs to define constrained parameters. The created macros are simple to use and easy to modify, independent from the programming knowledge. The user is only responsible with parameter input and running the program. The solution gives wiring pattern for a car seat heater.
Source: Jönköping University
Author: Hamon Abdollahifakhr | Ceyhun Sengul