Efficient Wire Routing and Wire Sizing for Weight Minimization of Automotive Systems

As the complexities of automotive systems increase, designing a system is a difficult task that cannot be done manually. In this paper, we focus on wire routing and wire sizing for weight minimization to deal with more and more connections between devices in automotive systems. The wire routing problem is formulated as a minimal Steiner tree problem with capacity constraints, and the location of a Steiner vertex is selected to add a splice which is used to connect more than two wires. We modify the Kou-Markowsky-Berman algorithm to efficiently construct Steiner trees and propose an integer linear programming (ILP) formulation to relocate Steiner vertices and satisfy capacity constraints. The ILP formulation is relaxed to a linear programming (LP) formulation which has the same optimal objective and can be solved more efficiently. Besides wire routing, wire sizing is also performed to satisfy resistance constraints and minimize the total wiring weight. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work in the literature to formulate the automotive routing problem as a minimal Steiner tree problem with capacity constraints and perform wire routing and wire sizing for weight minimization. An industrial case study shows the effectiveness and efficiency of our algorithm which provides an efficient, flexible, and scalable approach for the design optimization of automotive systems.