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.