Sequential graph-based routing algorithm for electrical harnesses, tubes, and hoses in a commercial vehicle

Abstract

The routing design of the various electrical wires, tubes, and hoses of a commercial vehicle requires a significant number of man-hours because of the variety of the commercial vehicles, frequent design changes of other vehicular components and the manual trial-and-error approaches. This study proposes a new graph-based routing algorithm to find the collision-free routing path in the constrained space of a commercial vehicle. Minimal spanning tree is adopted to connect multi-terminal points in a graph and Dijkstra's algorithm is used to find the shortest route among the candidate paths; the design domain is divided into several sub-domains to simplify the graph and the proposed algorithm solves the routing problems in a sequential manner to deal intermediate points. Then, the proposed method was applied to the design of the routes for four different routing components of a commercial truck. The results indicate that the developed methodology can provide a satisfactory routing design satisfying all the requirements of the design experts in the automotive industry.