Volkswagen - Harness Navigator
With the Harness Navigator, engineers quickly and easily examine complex vehicle electrical system designs. The tool facilitates work with the wiring system for both experts and occasional users. This significantly reduces time and costs.
Project goals
Where are critical cross-sections in the vehicle electrical system? Where are bottlenecks? Which functions run in which installation spaces? What does the 3D model of a specific variant look like? Are safety-critical cables located in crash areas? How can faults in the wiring harness be made visible quickly? How can electrological details and 3D models be clearly combined and displayed within a single application? And all this in an intuitive and easy-to-use system? Many questions, many challenges - one solution: the Harness Navigator.
Screenshot: Harness Navigator
The benefits for VW
The Harness Navigator answers all these questions within one system. This enables Volkswagen to reduce both the time required and the risk of errors in the field of vehicle electrical system development.
- The Harness Navigator allows the user - whether expert or occasional user - a detailed analysis of the vehicle electrical system in 3D mode. Until now, the JT file for the installation space analysis did not contain any electrological information. For examinations in the past, therefore, additional sources of information had to be consulted besides the simplified 3D model, with the risk that critical faults could sometimes only be found in the hardware of prototypes or pre-series.
- By coupling the information from the two standards VEC and JT, a 3D representation with embedded VEC is generated. In this way, all vehicle electrical system elements can be represented in a 3D model within the vehicle context.
- In addition, it is possible to enrich the 3D model with semantic information or to configure it on the basis of a wide range of information. This allows for an accurate verification of the wiring harnesses within a single application.
- Thanks to the implementation with a simple and bidirectional model, intuitive navigation is guaranteed even for occasional users. Due to the integration of all standard and analysis functions of the Viewer, different questions can be dealt with easily and with little expenditure of time with the help of the Harness Navigator.
The contribution of 4Soft
In the 4Soft project team, we designed and developed the Harness Navigator as an individual software system. Starting with an initial system idea from the customer, we worked out and refined requirements in close consultation with the specialist department and documented them in the form of user stories. In short, agile development cycles, prototypes were created on this basis, which we coordinated with the later users and further developed into a finished application. In cooperation with the responsible persons at Volkswagen, we then transferred the application into productive operation and trained the users.
What particularly distinguishes us as 4Soft development teams is our experience in the agile implementation of demanding IT projects in combination with sound knowledge in the field of cable harness development. This enabled us to provide Volkswagen with optimal support throughout the entire project.
