Cable harness digital model with topology as its skeleton

It was difficult to provide universal representations for topological structure, geometry and other information of complex cable harness in electro-mechanical products. Aiming at this problem, a novel digital model of cable harness was proposed with topology as its skeleton. In this model, the practical cable harness was abstracted into hierarchical basic elements, and the topological structure was expressed respectively by inclusion relationship between basic elements, and by graph that showed the joint relationship of them. The topological structure was used as the skeleton of digital model. Other information including geometry, electric connections, materials were assigned on different sets of basic elements. The methods to retrieve different information in the model and to create virtual cable in 3D environment were also presented. The model was utilized in digital cable layout design and cable assembly simulation. The results showed its capability to express the complex structure and information of the cable harness.