About routing and unrouting cables and wires

When you route a wire or cable, you place unrouted wires (including cable wires) into selected segments in the active harness using methods that range from manual to fully automatic. Routed wires can be further routed using manual route. Unrouting removes the wires from all or selected segments.

By default, wire lengths, cable lengths, and segment diameters are automatically calculated when routing and unrouting. If the harness settings are set to defer updates, click Update to calculate the diameters.

How do cable and wire routing and unrouting differ?

When routing and unrouting individual wires, each wire is independent and can take a different path through the assembly. When routing and unrouting cables all cable wires that make up the cable must follow the same path. You select a single cable wire, and then all cable wires associated with the same cable are routed and unrouted together. If a change is made to the routing or unrouting of one cable wire, all associated cable wires also change.

What types of routing can I do?

There are three types of routing in Cable & Harness:

Manual route (single segment) - routes selected wires and cables into selected segments one at a time. The segments can be discontinuous. This method can be used as an incremental routing method to create networks with gaps.
Semi-automatic route - inserts selected wires and cables into continuous segments.
Automatic route (all or selected )- automatically inserts all or selected unrouted wires and cables into the segment that is closest to the wire pins, and also represents the shortest path. The segments must be continuous.

What determines routes for the automatic and semi-automatic commands?

When automatically routing, the system checks for the harness segment ends closest to each end of the wire or cable. When the segment ends are identified, the system examines all segments found, and then looks for the shortest path. After finding the shortest path, the objects are routed.

If the harness segment endpoints found are within 0.005 meters of one another, they are considered to be the same distance. If there is no connection between any of the identified start and end segments, the route fails. In this case, route the wires or cables using manual methods.

What types of unrouting can be done?

Using a combination of the commands on the Unroute dialog box, there are several options for unrouting wires (including cable wires). You can unroute:

Selected wires from all segments (default)
Selected wires from selected segments
All wires from selected segments
All wires from all segments

When the last wire is unrouted from a segment that is set to calculate size from wires, the segment diameter does not change from the diameter it had with that last wire in it. The current segment does not resize when unrouting all wires at once.

How are wire points handled during route and unroute?

All wire or cable wire work points are deleted:

when routed from a point to point state
when unrouted from all segments