The Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) Avionic Systems Group, located in Huntsville, Alabama, designs and develops internal hardware and software systems used in space craft. The Group required a tool to assist in the engineering design of wire harnesses, as well as a tool to generate reference and production documentation to facilitate the construction of the harnesses.



These diagrams were previously produced either with Microstation or a set of in-house designed Visio templates and shapes. This method of developing the drawing package was essentially a manual process. The design engineer would add information to the drawings as it becomes available as the project design is developed. The pieces of information that define the overall characteristics of each wire harness were spread across each of the drawings, and in many cases duplicate information now exists on multiple drawings. The MSFC Avionics group desired a system to reduce the number of places this information is entered, in order to reduce the potential for errors due to mismatched information across diagrams.