A Decision Support System for a concurrent design of cable harnesses: Conceptual approach and implementation

This paper presents the conceptual design and experimental validation of a Decision Support System built in a concurrent engineering context. This system aims at supporting the design of cable harnesses, that is an important step in the design of electrical equipment of complex assembled products. Here, the validation has been made through the industrial case of helicopters' design. The CAD tool uses the association of two different methods that proved useful for decision aid: constraints propagation and multicriteria evaluation. Such an association offers a relevant solution for concurrent engineering. Constraints and criteria express technical knowledge into elementary units easy understandable and easy to pass around. Those two concepts make it easier to integrate production knowledge and design knowledge. We shall present here the technical domain we refer to (electrical field), the industrial context for the validation (MODES project), and a comparison to another approach with similar objectives (Stanford University DSS).