  Designing cable harnesses can be time-consuming and complex due to many
design and manufacturing aspects and rules. Automating the design process can
help to fulfil these rules, speed up the process, and optimize the design. To
accommodate this, we formulate a harness routing optimization problem to
minimize cable lengths, maximize bundling by rewarding shared paths, and
optimize the cables' spatial location with respect to case-specific information
of the routing environment, e.g., zones to avoid. A deterministic and
computationally effective cable harness routing algorithm has been developed to
solve the routing problem and is used to generate a set of cable harness
topology candidates and approximate the Pareto front. Our approach was tested
against a stochastic and an exact solver and our routing algorithm generated
objective function values better than the stochastic approach and close to the
exact solver. Our algorithm was able to find solutions, some of them being
proven to be near-optimal, for three industrial-sized 3D cases within
reasonable time (in magnitude of seconds to minutes) and the computation times
were comparable to those of the stochastic approach.
