The Vehicle Electrical System Computer Aided Design (VESCAD) tool is a means by which the vehicle electrical system, including all wiring and the components attached to wiring can be laid out over an outline of the planform (looking down on the vehicle) view of the vehicle.
This graphical representation of the vehicle electrical system is linked to a database that contains the definition of all the wiring of the vehicle plus electrical component attributes. The vehicle electrical system can be composed and completely manipulated graphically, using a mouse, and the database is dynamically changed, including automatic re-routing of the wiring in the wiring harnesses.
A complete series of reports can be generated once a vehicle electrical system is configured using VESCAD. All of the reports can be keyed by component(s), harness(es), subsystem(s) or the entire vehicle.
In addition, efforts are underway to link a netlist of the VESCAD vehicle electrical configuration to behavioral models in simulation tools to do full vehicle analysis including functional verification, voltage drop calculation, fuse sizing, sneak path identification, etc.
As a result of using VESCAD, the vehicle electrical system design can be manipulated and analyzed in hours, as opposed to weeks, using conventional methods.