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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.

The objective of this paper is to illustrate an interactive computer graphics program developed to simplify the creation of finite element data which will be used for computerized structural analysis. Three-dimensional, part definition data in the form of basic design lines is input to the program and displayed on a cathode ray tube, and then a structural engineer creates the finite element definition using various computer graphics techniques. The procedures involved are discussed in detail, as well as the advantages over the traditional manual approach to element generation. Actual experience has demonstrated that this interactive computer graphic approach, in addition to being both accurate and reliable, is approximately fifteen times faster than the tedious manual method.