A New Method for Variant Design Technology in ECAD

One of the most important approaches to enable cost and time reduction with respect to Computer-Aided Design for electrical/electromechanical engineering (ECAD/ECAE) is to develop, generate, and handle design variants in an efficient manner. The objective of this paper is to present a generic variant design technology approach that has a high potential for the efficient reusability of existing projects. More precisely, the paper will present the procedure to allow the new methodology in variant design technology to be implemented within an arbitrary ECAD environment. The method presented automatically generates a complete technical documentation of an electrical installation on the basis of a placed order specification. This involves three major steps. Firstly, a product variant of an installation is configured on the basis of existing standardised modules. Secondly, based upon the corresponding configuration file, a set of commands describing the generation of a typical ECAD project containing the configured modules is automatically compiled. This is a key novelty, as all commands are expressed in a non-system specific meta-language, which can then be automatically translated into a macro programming language of a specific ECAD system and stored as a file. Thirdly, the specific ECAD system can import and process the file to create a practical ECAD project of realistic complexity.