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The ability to provide a tool integrated environment for quick exploration and optimization of system architecture design alternatives is of paramount importance to the automotive industry. An integrated analysis environment can help reduce development and production costs as well as production time to the market. Given a large number of design alternatives, engineers cannot evaluate them manually due to time constraints. Thus a flexible and scalable tool that helps engineers to automatically explore the design space and optimally select a design meeting the design objectives and constraints is a key for succeeding in this area. This paper discusses lessons learned through hands-on experiences with an existing commercial tool and provides in-depth insights of the development process and complexities.

In this paper, we propose algorithms for cost minimization of physical wires that are used to connect electronic devices in the vehicle. The wiring cost is one of the most important drivers of electrical architecture selection. Our algorithms perform wire routing from a source device to a destination device through harnesses, by selecting the optimized wire size. In addition, we provide optimized splice allocation with limited constraints. Based on the algorithms, we develop a tool which is integrated into an off-the-shelf optimization and workflow system-level design tool. The algorithms and the tool provide an efficient, flexible, scalable, and maintainable approach for cost analysis and architecture selection.