An approach to providing computational support for concurrent design is discussed in the context of an industrial cable harness design problem. Key issues include the development of an architecture that supports collaboration among specialists, the development of hierarchical representations that capture different characteristics of the design, and the decomposition of tasks to achieve a trade-off between efficiency and robustness. An architecture is presented in which the main design tasks are supported by agents – asynchronous and semiautonomous modules that automate routine design tasks and provide specialized interfaces for working on particular aspects of the design. The agent communication and coordination mechanisms permit members of an engineering team to work concurrently, at different levels of detail and on different versions of the design. The design is represented hierarchically, with detailed models maintained by the participating agents. Abstractions of the detailed models, called “agent model images,” are shared with other agents. In conjunction with the architecture and design representations, issues pertaining to the exchange of information among different views of the design, management of dependencies and constraints, and propagation of design changes are discussed.

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We describe a system for routing cable harnesses in complex, three-dimensional environments. The approach taken is to automate the basic routing process as much as possible, while allowing designers to guide the system and modify the numerically generated results at any stage. The system begins by quickly generating a coarse routing based on an initial guess of the cable harness configuration (topological structure). Paths are then successively refined to minimize a cost function, while satisfying physical constraints such as minimum bending radius. Human input is useful both for guiding the system away from local minima and for responding to case-specific constraints not encoded in the router.