by Frank Lombard
The need and ability to transform wiring diagrams into a interactive digital medium has a long history. Where ground breaking approaches, such as Boeing's patented, automated schematic transformation process have paved the way to making the concept a reality. Many other approaches have since been developed but not all are equivalent. The spectrum of solutions are from tools that bound the user to a CAD tool, so the wire tracing begins at the design of a system or redrawing a legacy system from scratch, to others that are much more service oriented and don't sell tools, but what they can do is import CAD information and transform the diagrams from just line primitives into colorful diagrams with tracing capability. But, unfortunately, many such services have no true circuit awareness or S1000D wiring module capability. Still vendors will claim an S1000D ability but they never disclose the work effort of modifying their processes to become S1000D compliant. So many researching how to implement a wiretracing solution will look at past wiretracing projects to get a perspective of the effectiveness and costs involved. But this kind of research fails to glean the progress made in this niche industry. For instance if you evaluated the Global Hawk's wiretracing solution you might leave a little wary. Why you may ask? Let me explain:
I was personally involved with the Global Hawk wiretracing project while employed by TFDG*. The Global Hawk was a project acquired before I was employed and in fact no automated wiretracing tools existed in the organization at the time. The funny thing about how wiretracing tools at TFDG came about was because I was given a stack of Global Hawk diagrams to manually hotspot using a CGM editor, please realize that I was hired as a senior software engineer, hardly an illustrator experienced with CGM editors.
As I was trained on how to use the editor to create the wiretracing hotspots I realized that there was a way to process diagrams with software to achieve the equivalent results that met Northrop Grumman's requirements of a wiretrace. With that said, what qualified as a wiretrace was actually an illusion of a wiretrace! Yes it did trace a line across diagrams and colorize it as well as highlight on the diagram but there was no informational relationship between what was hot-spotted as a wire and what it was connected to. Meaning the informational relationship was something a human-being was cognitively doing by looking at the colorized label of the wire's name. While the CGM hotspot tag did contain information as to the wire type, power, ground or signal, there was a data disconnect to the equipment the wire connected to, its actual labeling and no hierarchical relationships of the assemblies and sub-assemblies existed. Such an approach does not qualify as a true connective wiretrace as described by the S1000D specifications. But this was good enough for Northrop at the time.
The big problem with what was delivered to Northrop as a wiretracing solution is the approach lacked the means to transform into an S1000D compliant wiring solution, at least not easily and definitely no S1000D wiring module could be construed from the data generated to build the CGM hotspotted lines! The Global Hawk solution was limited tool that could not apply any form of machine intelligence, other than a database query, to circuit troubleshooting. There was no means to apply predictive analysis or generate consequence reports since no S1000D type connectivity information existed in the database or viewing tool. Also the solution was very difficult to maintain since what was delivered as maintenance tools to Northrop were simply a COTS CGM editor, which required the manual creation of a wiretrace hotspot, and a database. Yes, believe it or not, this passed the mustard, at the time, as a wiretracing solution.
Since then I started Atlas Dynamics and the early days of a primitive simple tracing tool have come a long way. Atlas was founded on the vision to bring wiretracing to a sophisticated level that can produce an S1000D wiring module from any existing schematic source, CAD, paper, or raster diagrams. The biggest problem from legacy systems to comply with S1000D wiring module requirements is capturing the hierarchical relationship and wiring inter-connectivity without having to manually type in this form of semantic information. Ultimately the goal of Atlas was to create a more competitive playing field by allowing technical publication firms that other wise would not pursue a wiretracing project because to build their own tools they would face very high software development costs.
Atlas' requirements for a wiretracing solution emerged from the concept to develop a tool that required no IT or software development support from the publication organization using the Atlas tools. This meant the tools needed to be adaptable,accurate and very user friendly. There were other lessons learned from my past experiences, such as, the lack of workflow and document management, where literally organizations simply used excel and ad-hoc check lists to QA diagrams. Atlas' tools employ document and workflow management as part of the package of its tool suite. The QA is machine assisted where all components and wires are monitored to insure labeling and typing are consisted across all diagrams. We automated the cross diagram linking of circuits that other organizations literally do manually! We also solved the problem as to how to manage applicability and provide a coherent navigation system across applicable systems and diagram versions, this includes differentiating applicable system versions. When all is done, its simply a matter of clicking a button to produce the S1000D wiring modules and a viewer with all the completed processed diagrams that can be installed on any Windows tablet or laptop.
When researching past wiring solutions, such as the Global Hawk, realize that the state of the art has evolved, or at least it has at Atlas Dynamics. Atlas' wiretracing tools, which have been used on aircraft such as Lockheed's C 130**, is a very sophisticated, easy to use and complete solution. The Atlas tool suite is the most cost effective wiretracing solution on the market today .
*TFDG did away with their wiretracing group many years ago by selling the division.
**Comments in the post regarding the C 130 does not imply nor should be perceived as an endorsement by Lockheed Martin Corporation. Lockheed Martin Corporation, as a company policy, does not endorse third party products.