Solving the Wire-Harness Design Problem at a European car manufacturer

In many industries, increasing competition and high customer expectations compel companies to widen their product offering. Car manufacturers face the same issue and tend to produce an increasingly large variety of models, with more and more electrical options. This leads to the design of a huge number of different electrical wire harnesses, but the use of component commonality can help reduce this number. This work, initiated in collaboration with a major European car manufacturer, provides a new mathematical formulation of the problem and several solution methods. Due to its size, the problem cannot be solved to optimality in reasonable time by exact methods. Hence, we introduce greedy heuristics, a descent method and a variable neighborhood search metaheuristic that provide high quality solutions in reasonable computing time. Results show that the use of these solution methods yields important cost savings with respect to the current practice of the company.