Modeling and Optimizing Wire Harness Costs for Variation Complexity

Traditional methods of costing wire harnesses focus primarily on the material and labor costs for manufacturing the final product. Rarely are costs related to variation-based complexity considered and when they are they tend to be simple approximations at best. In reality, the additional costs of excessive variation resulting in large part counts (unique harness level part numbers) can have a significant impact on the final cost incurred by an organization, and is often difficult to account for making it impossible for an organization to optimize their design, and everything that goes into making and delivering a finished product. It's important that these costs first be understood and modeled, and second that the designs be optimized based on this model.

This paper will discuss these complexity based costs, including common sources, how they can be modeled, and methods for optimizing designs to account for these costs.