CHANGE MANAGEMENT

IN MULTI-DOMAIN SYSTEMS

MUHAMMAD ASK AR, PRODUCT MARKETING MANAGER - MENTOR, A SIEMENS

BUSINESS

W H I T E P A P E R

E L E C T R I C A L & W I R E H A R N E S S D E S I G N

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Change Management in Multi-Domain Systems

INTRODUCTION
The complexity of electrical, electronic, and wiring systems is expanding as products in various industries
increasingly rely on electrical and electronic components to perform their most basic functions. Modern
multi-role fighter jets contain up to one hundred thousand signal interfaces as critical systems, such as the
flight controls, are performed electronically. This all results in an explosion of the number of buildable
configurations of a platform.

Product requirements are in near-constant flux causing hundreds of design changes at each project milestone.
The impact of these changes has to be assessed for all buildable configurations of a product, and the changes
applied only to the relevant configurations. Change impact assessment, propagation, and communication
present the biggest challenges in product design for automotive, aerospace, off-highway, and other
companies.

To illustrate the far-reaching impact of change on product design, consider the example of a single signal in a
platform (Figure 1). Several requirements and decisions in other domains can affect the implementation of this
electrical signal. An end-device supplier may rectify an incorrect board layout causing a pinout change that
alters the connectivity. Or, a hydraulic system change that causes a pump to need a higher inrush current
would need a larger gauge of wire to handle the increased load. Finally, the design office may want to update
an instrument panel layout, moving the packaging location of an ECU to a different harness and requiring the
signal to route through an inline with new supporting wiring.

Figure 1: The design for a single signal connecting two end-points in an electrical system is affected by multiple domains.

These design changes represent significant rework on the design of just one signal (Figure 2). Now, imagine
that these changes need to be applied to every configuration of a full platform. Propagating these changes
effectively is a challenge in itself, but each change to the design causes knock-on effects that can alter or
invalidate other abstractions of one or more systems. These effects must be understood.

Figure 2: The electrical design of a single signal can change drastically due to the impact of multi-domain relationships.

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It is imperative for companies to employ a robust and comprehensive change management methodology to
track, understand, implement, and document each change made to the design. In this whitepaper, we will
discuss the challenges of change management, and how the Capital® suite of tools helps companies achieve
efficient solutions.

CHANGE SPECIFICATION
The first step to managing change is specifying the change to be made and understanding the confluence of
domains involved. The functional, software, networks, wiring, harness, and mechanical domains all need to be
considered in a change request as changes in any one domain affect the rest.

For example, adding a smartphone connector to a commercial aircraft seat requires changes to the definition
of the seat control unit, updated software to interact with the phone, and updates to the networks connecting
each seat. Then, the engineers must also change the wiring and connectors available in the seat, the bill of
materials, and the physical harness structures.

Another example is the inclusion of advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) in a car. These systems will
increase the number of wires needed in the harness bundles, expanding the bundle diameter and potentially
causing clearance issues with the mechanical structures of the car. This would necessitate re-routing of the
wiring harness by the mechanical engineers that, in turn, demands changes to the harness design to account
for bend radii, bundle diameter restrictions, or potential signal integrity degradation.

A detailed description of the change along with the scope of its impact on the design is necessary to help
manage these multi-domain dependencies. Capital employs engineering change orders to accomplish this
goal.

Engineering Change Orders, or ECOs, are at the heart of Capital’s change management methodology. ECOs are
used to define, organize, and track changes using formal life-cycled objects that capture three key pieces of
information: a change description, the impacted designs, and the relevant configurations (Figure 3). ECOs also
contain meta-data to assist engineers in carrying out the change. Capital Connect assists in creating ECOs
through the identification of impacted designs by linking the different abstractions that contain a given
object. For instance, a functional signal can be traced to its corresponding net, wire, and bundle in the logical,
wiring, and harness abstractions respectively.

Figure 3: Engineering Change

Orders are used to describe
changes and their affected
designs, and to track change
status throughout the lifecycle
of the change.

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Design changes may originate from within the electrical design team, or from external domains. For changes
that originate from external domains, such as mechanical, Capital’s Change Manager helps the electrical
engineers to understand and effect the requested changes quickly and accurately. Change Manager can
associate related objects by name, part number, or MCAD ID; transform a 3D layout into a 2D layout using
three alternative modes of flattening; and cross-highlight changes that need to be carried out both in tabular
and diagram views (Figure 4).

Figure 4: Change Manager associates objects with a variety of identifiers, transforms 3D layouts to 2D, and cross-highlights changes.

Integration with external change

management systems is critical to
managing the overall flow of changes.
ECO initiation, completion, and other
events can be integrated with
requirements management systems to
support product requirement changes
specified by marketing, or with product
lifecycle management (PLM) systems to
synchronize change records across
different domains. An example of such an
integration with IBM Rational
Teamconcert is shown below (Figure 5).

Change specification is the first step to

managing change. Change specification
is made up of a description of the change
needed and the designs involved. ECOs
capture changes at a high level to tie
each discipline together, ensuring that
changes are propagated throughout the Figure 5: Integration allows work items from IBM Teamconcert to be turned
abstractions and that the impact can be into ECOs in Capital. When changes are carried out the design status is
assessed effectively. reported back to Teamconcert.

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CHANGE IMPLEMENTATION
CARRYING-OUT THE CHANGES
The next step is to implement and propagate the changes across the design abstractions in a managed and
controlled fashion. Several pieces of technology help engineers to achieve these goals.

Engineers begin by completing the requested changes in the appropriate abstraction. As in an earlier
example, this could be changing a part number on a device that results in a different pinout. To do this, the
engineer updates the part number and the nets connected to the device in the logic design.

Next, this change needs to be propagated to other abstractions such as the wiring and harness designs. To
propagate the change, the engineer employs Capital Converge to compare the source and target abstractions,
automatically identifying a list of actions to carry out on the target abstraction. The tool then guides the
engineer through each change using an interactive to-do list (Figure 6). This list contains hyperlinks that direct
the engineer to the locations where changes are needed. As the engineer completes changes they are crossed
off the to-do list, ensuring change items are not missed.

Figure 6: Designer can create a to-do list of changes for a design. This list is interactive and integrated into the design flow.

Generative design flows, in which wiring is synthesized from logical schematics and topology constraints
using rules-based automation, enable change propagation to be automated. This is due to the incremental
nature of the main synthesis mechanisms in a generative flow, such as Capital Integrator’s Composite and
Modular Wiring Synthesis mechanisms. These mechanisms can synthesize or remove wiring as needed by each
specific change, while minimizing the impact on any pre-existing wiring. This means that the engineers can
execute incremental changes quickly as the automated wiring synthesis removes the need for time-
consuming manual re-design.

Rapid change propagation must be paired with a change policy that defines which teams have mastery over
which data and the direction in which changes will flow. Capital has a robust set of options that allow for the
automatic control of how data is changed. Ownership over data is determined in a granular fashion so that the
change policy can be tailored to individual design flows. The pieces available for selection are highly detailed,
such that rules may be set for specific attributes of individual components. For example, rules may be set for
the synchronization of changes between wiring from Logic or Integrator and wiring in HarnessXC such that
connector option expressions can be updated, but part numbers cannot (Figure 7). The change policies are
active during data transfers, as teams integrate across domains, and real-time while engineers are working.

COSTING CHANGES
Design changes can have considerable effects on the project timeline and cost. The impacts of change orders
on project cost are particularly important and difficult to understand. Therefore, elegant change management
solutions must include an assessment of cost impact. Product cost, sales price & profit are key to any
manufacturing organization, but a complete evaluation of project cost will examine other, non-financial,
measures. These can include weight, complexity, and quality targets for the wiring harness or machine in
general. A wider “costing” analysis will also investigate various electrical distribution system variants and
electrical architectures to determine the optimal design.

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Figure 7: Changes are gated between domains enabling engineers to control the propagation of changes throughout the design.

Capital is equipped with real-time cost metrics that show the impact of design changes on financial, weight,
quality, power, and other costs (Figure 8). These metrics are configurable and driven directly by design data,
enabling them to update as engineers enact changes. To add even more functionality, Capital’s costing
metrics can integrate with sophisticated external systems to provide extremely fine-grained analysis.
Engineering teams can use this functionality to tailor the costing metrics for specific project needs. For
example, a team could integrate a tool that predicts the price of copper empowering the team to make design
decisions proactively. These metrics are available at various stages of the development, and configurable for
different applications.

Figure 8: Capital’s costing metrics display financial, complexity, weight and other metrics to inform design decisions.

With the fully engineered harness, design teams can use Capital’s Costing and Total Value Management
technologies to complete a detailed labor and material costing to estimate the time it would take to create
the given harness based on labor rates, efficiencies, and raw material cost. The team could also compare the
costs of manufacturing the harness at various facilities to choose the best possible option.

RELEASING/APPROVING CHANGES
Key project milestones are often the point of convergence for a multitude of design changes. Electrical and
electronic system designs have formal lifecycles through which various design teams will create and iterate on
their portions of the design. At key project milestones, all of these design changes will be released for review.
The challenge for design teams is ensuring that the release of design changes occurs in an organized and
manageable procedure.

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One solution is to establish controls on the initiation and realization of design changes, which mark the
transition of a design from one stage to the next. With these permissions in place, the engineers and
designers would be able to transition the draft of a design change to a pending status. At this point, the
manager can then review the pending design change, approve it, and then mark it for release. Both individual
change orders and the design at large have lifecycles. The key is to control who is able to transition these
between stages to control the progression of the lifecycle.

CHANGE COMMUNICATION
Effective change management methods and systems are based on a foundation of comprehensive
communication. Communication regarding design changes is critical to ensuring that all involved teams
understand the nature, status, reasons for, and effects of the changes required. Change communication is also
important to keeping external parties informed and up to date on the project.

Various project stakeholders will seek to accomplish different goals with the change documentation. The
authority that initiated the change will wish to verify that their change has been accurately and efficiently
completed. Design or engineering managers will use the documentation to review and approve changes and
their implementation, and the manufacturing and costing teams will use the documentation to understand
how the change impacts their workflow and formulate a response.

Capital is able to publish change illustration packages that communicate the change in an interactive, web-
based environment to interested parties. Such packages feature interactive visualizations of the changes
applied, allowing recipients to explore the changes as well as underlying data behind it in the right context
(Figure 9).

Figure 9: Interactive change illustrations can be published in a web-based client for various stakeholders to consume locally or remotely over the
network.

Designers can establish design milestones that will trigger the automatic production and distribution of these
change packages (Figure 10). For an even more advanced communication system, Capital can integrate with
other systems to inform the recipient of the availability of a new change package, for example using e-mail
notifications.

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Capital’s Change Illustrator is ideal for

communicating with independent
stakeholders outside the design environment
as the illustrations do not require tool setup or
expertise. Reports can be created for systems,
wiring, harness, and formboard designs,
facilitating effective communication in all Figure 10: Capital can automatically create Change Illustrator packages
facets of the electrical system design. when certain events occur, such as when new revisions are released, by
comparing to a baseline, or to the previous revision.

In each context, stakeholders can visualize the needed changes and understand their impact through the
following:

––Observing a graphical view of changes that uses colors to categorize change types: additions,
alterations, deletions
––Cross-probing of tables for each change type with the diagram location of where that change is
happening
––Expanding detailed views that display underlying data for components or wires
––Searching reports and diagrams for parts, components, etc.

A COMPLETE CHANGE MANAGEMENT SOLUTION

Change management is an ever-present challenge in product development. After initial design work is
complete, the entirety of the remaining design flow is iteration and change. In other words, “you only do
things for the first time once”. As designs progress through their formal lifecycle, more and more changes are
introduced that must be proposed, effected, and communicated to involved parties. Additionally, the
complexity of modern electrical systems means that this process occurs hundreds of times over the course of
the product development. Manufacturers and Tier 1 suppliers must have a comprehensive and integrated
solution for managing design changes.

Capital provides a flexible architecture that facilitates all aspects of change management from definition, to
implementation and review, to effective communication. Project coordinators are able to describe changes
and their impacted designs, and then manage the lifecycle of that change order thereafter. Design teams are
able to quickly understand and propagate proposed changes, improving their accuracy and speed while
performing changes. Finally, stakeholders are able to explore the proposed changes and their
implementations, and understand them clearly.

In sum, Capital’s portfolio of technologies reduces the challenge and cost of change management and
communication via automation, digital continuity, and ease of use.

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