GENERATIVE DESIGN FOR EV

ELECTRICAL SYSTEMS

DOUG BURCICKI, DIRECTOR AUTOMOTIVE - 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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Generative Design for EV Electrical Systems

Electric vehicles (EVs) are popularly held as the future of personal mobility and transportation (Figure 1). New
electric car manufacturers are flooding the market while established OEMs divert more investment to electric
vehicle programs in an attempt to stay ahead. All of these manufacturers will face significant challenges
during development. Automotive electrical and electronic systems are becoming more complex, and that is
making the task of designing today’s cars much more difficult. Infotainment, comfort and convenience
features, and even safety- and mission-critical systems such as steering and throttle control are accomplished
through electrically powered computers, actuators, and sensors.

Figure 1: Many expect electric vehicles to take over as the primary mode of personal transportation and mobility in the future.

Electric vehicles will only further increase this challenge as every system in the car will be electrically powered.
As more systems are added, a higher load will be placed on the batteries powering the vehicle. This includes
incredibly high voltage transmission lines that will bring power to the electric motor driving the car. These
lines require additional design guidelines to ensure they are bundled and routed appropriately. To succeed, EV
manufacturers will need to integrate all of these features into a safe, reliable, and high quality package.

To add to this challenge, electric vehicles require extensive testing and validation to ensure safety while
maximizing the drive range and performance of the vehicle. Manufacturers will need to incorporate the
lessons learned through simulated and real-world testing into their electric vehicle designs to remain
competitive.

FROM HYBRID TO FULL ELECTRIC

The ramp to all electric vehicles presents significant challenges for the engineers tasked with their design.
Critically, the engineers must optimize the charging and discharging of the battery packs to maximize the
drive range and performance of the vehicle. In addition, engineers must balance the supply of electrical
power between the engine and the litany of safety, comfort, and convenience features that have become
commonplace in modern vehicles. Systems such as in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) and the instrument cluster,
climate control, and advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) all place a load on the battery.

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Generative Design for EV Electrical Systems

Hybrid electric and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles use a combination of internal combustion and electric
powertrains to maximize drive range, fuel efficiency, and performance (Figure 2). Most hybrid electric vehicles
can be driven completely by either the internal combustion engine (ICE), or the electric motor, or by a
combination. The ICE can also create electric energy and charge the batteries, much like it would in a
traditional vehicle. This combination of energy sources gives hybrid electric and plug-in hybrid electric
vehicles tremendous flexibility in how energy is created to power various systems.

Figure 2: Hybrid electric vehicles have both electric and traditional powertrains to power various systems within the vehicle.

All-electric vehicles do not have the support of a supplemental source of power such as an ICE. All the power
the vehicle needs is supplied by the energy stored in the batteries. As a result, the number and sophistication
of the electronic features on an electric vehicle has a direct effect on the drive range and performance of the
vehicle. ADAS systems often incorporate cameras, radar, and ultrasonic sensors to enable lane departure
warning systems, automatic braking, and more. These systems are a constant drain on the battery as they are
always active.

To enhance the efficiency of the electrical and electronic systems, and thus drive range, engineers will need to
perform architecture and tradeoff analyses to investigate architectural proposals. The tradeoff analyses for an
EV will need to account for hundreds of components and millions of signals while optimizing function
locations, network latency, error rates and more. In addition, engineers will need to manage the high voltage
lines that carry power to the electric motor, or motors. These lines often require special design guidelines
regarding routing and bundling that must be taken into account.

Despite these challenges, electric drive is a burgeoning market. There are almost 350 companies known to be
developing electric vehicles, and that number continues to increase. Some of these are major automotive
manufacturers seeking to stay ahead of the coming industry disruption, but most are startups or companies
from other industries seeking to enter a traditionally impenetrable market. These companies lack industry-
specific experience and the engineering resources to brute force their way through the complexities of
electric vehicle design. Even the major automotive OEMs will face problems that their legacy design flows are
ill-equipped to handle.

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Generative Design for EV Electrical Systems

This will be true especially as companies move their electric vehicle projects from research, development, and
one-off prototyping into full-scale production. The electrical and electronic systems will need to be optimized
for cost, weight, and power consumption while adhering to the stringent safety requirements prevalent in the
automotive industry. To compete, these companies will need a new design methodology that enables young
engineers to design accurate and optimized systems, which can only be done by capturing the experience
and knowledge of veteran engineers. They will need generative design.

GENERATIVE DESIGN & ENGINEERING

Generative design takes system definitions and
requirements as input and generates architectural
proposals for the logic, software, hardware, and
networks of the electrical and electronic systems
using rules-based automation (Figure 3). These
rules capture the knowledge and experience of
the veteran engineers to guide younger engineers
throughout the design. Capturing this IP helps
companies to develop both vehicle architectures
and new generations of engineers as they learn Figure 3: Generative design uses rules-based automation to generate
and implement existing company knowledge. proposals for the logic, software, hardware, and networks of the E/E
system.

A generative design flow begins with functional models. A functional model represents the functionality of
the electrical system to be implemented, without specifying how it should be implemented. It accounts for
aspects such as communication networks, power sources, and components. These models may be captured in
a variety of formats such as spreadsheets, SysML files, and MS Visio diagrams.

Design teams then normalize these various functional models into a unified format within their electrical
systems design environment, such as Capital. Once normalized, the engineers can generate potential
architectures for the E/E system logic, networks, hardware, and software. Valuable company IP is integrated
automatically into these proposals through the design rules that govern proposal generation. At this stage,
the electrical engineers can rapidly generate, assess, and compare multiple architectural proposals, optimizing
the design from the initial solutions presented.

From the selected architectural proposal, the engineers can extract discreet logical systems to generate
platform-level network designs and the electrical distribution system (EDS). With this in place, the team can
synthesize wire harness designs for each subsystem, generate manufacturing aids and bills-of-process costs,
publish electrical service data, and generate VIN-specific service documentation.

WHY GENERATIVE?
The increasing electrical and electronic content of modern vehicles is already pushing current design methods
to their limits, yet the complexity of automotive systems will only continue to grow in the future. Fully electric
cars will contain incredibly complicated electrical and electronic systems. The drivetrain and critical systems
alone will require a sophisticated system of computers, sensors, and actuators to manage battery charge and
discharge, control systems, and the electric motors. What’s more, future electric vehicles will contain dozens
of sensors, hundreds of ECUs, and miles of wiring to gather, process, and transmit the data required for
advanced features. Engineers developing these vehicles will also need to balance performance requirements
against power consumption, physical space constraints, weight, and thermal considerations.

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Generative Design for EV Electrical Systems

Generative design empowers automotive engineers to tackle the challenges of electrical and electronic
systems design for electric vehicles. It employs rules-based automation for rapid design synthesis, enables
engineers to design in the context of a full vehicle platform, and tightly integrates various design domains to
ensure data continuity.

Firstly, employing automation throughout the process will help design teams manage design complexity
without increasing time-to-market. Automation helps engineers focus on the most critical aspects of the
design and verification of the functionality of the E/E system and reduces errors from manual data entry. This
empowers engineers to focus more of their time on applying their creativity and ingenuity to creating the
next generation of automotive technology breakthroughs. Automation also applies company IP to the
generated proposals through design rules, increasing the accuracy and quality of the designs.

Next, designing in the full platform context helps engineers to understanding the way signals, wires, and
other components are implemented across the entire vehicle platform, thereby reducing errors at interfaces
or due to the intricacy of the harness. This design flow also enables teams to re-use validated data across
vehicle platforms to improve quality and reduce development costs.

Finally, a tightly integrated environment enables the electrical engineers to share data with engineers and
tools in other domains, such as mechanical or PCB design. The interactions between the electrical, mechanical,
and software components of a vehicle are increasing. Seamless synchronization of data between these
domains improves the integration of them into a single system.

DATA CONTINUITY
Generative design creates a continuous thread of data from the initial system definition and requirements to
full-scale production and service. The same data feeds each stage of the generative design flow so that
nothing is lost between design stages or design domains. This continuous thread of data keeps all
engineering team members up to date and working with the most current data while also ensuring that
designs are meeting various requirements for functionality, safety, weight and so forth (Figure 4).

Figure 4: Generative design ensures data continuity from initial system definitions through production and after-sales for full traceability and
compliance with requirements.

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Generative Design for EV Electrical Systems

Built-in design rules enable engineers to check designs for flaws automatically, flaws that can easily be lost in
the sheer complexity of an electric vehicle. These design rule checks can catch unterminated wire ends,
inconsistencies in graphical and physical bundle lengths, and check for current loads on wires, generated
heat, and other faults. Again, generative design employs company IP through these design rule checks to
catch design flaws that have caused trouble in the past or that new engineers may not think to check.

Additionally, data continuity enhances the engineer’s ability to analyze the impact of design changes.
Traditional design methodologies struggle to quantify the knock-on effects of design changes. Each change
affects the rest of the system, and the second- and third-order effects can be very difficult to predict.
Migrating an ECU to a new location or network in the architecture may affect performance elsewhere in the
system. This change in behavior may cascade, invalidating any number of subsystems.

Data continuity ensures that projects have a single data source, providing a clear picture of the myriad inter-
domain and inter-system interactions. As changes are made to the design, they can be examined with detailed
impact analysis that will inform the engineer of issues the change may cause in other domains. For instance,
moving or removing an ECU could be assessed for its impact on network timing, signal integrity, or physical
clearance and collision issues. As a result, changes are made knowing their full impact on the system.

ELECTRIFYING THE DRIVE

Generative design will be a key enabler for new and established automotive companies as they develop all-
electric vehicle platforms. The ability to generate electrical system architectures automatically enables early
exploration and optimization of designs while embedding company IP into the design flow. Additionally, a
singular source of data promotes consistency between domains, design reuse, and enhances the analysis of
change impact. Finally, tight integrations between the electrical domains and with mechanical and PLM tools
streamlines the entire design flow from conception through production.

The significant complexity inherent in electric vehicle design will continue to push the tools and
methodologies used by automotive engineers. This is especially true in the electrical and electronic systems
domains as they come to dominate the operation of a vehicle’s safety-critical systems and amenities. The
winners in this disruptive technology will be those companies that can most effectively integrate the
advanced technologies required for all-electric powertrains into a package that is reliable, safe, and attractive
to consumers, and then get those technologies to market quickly and with a high level of quality.

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