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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.

Traditional methods for optimizing an Electrical Distribution System have always been less than ideal. Engineers are typically left with unsophisticated and manual spreadsheet tools. Any detailed feedback on critical metrics such as cost or weight typically relies on another organization and requires week or months. The resulting EDS is inevitably suboptimized, not due to a lack of engineering ability, but rather the tools available. To ensure that the EDS design is optimized from the outset, the design environment itself must be enhanced. There are four key attributes to this design environment. Automation is required to ensure that designs are synthesized rather than manually created. There are many benefits of this, but efficiency and repeatability are most important to this conversation. The ability to measure and assess the design must be available in the design, while the engineer is designing. The metrics used to measure must be easy to create and modify.