US Patent 7087839 Slack-based method for determining wire harness tolerance

A slack-based method for determining fastener placement tolerances for a wire harness relative to a vehicle mounting point layout. The method uses a determination of maximum permissible slack between pairs of adjacent mounting points to calculate tolerances for each point-to-point segment of the wire harness. The determination of maximum permissible slack is made by inspection of the vehicle mounting point layout between each set of mounting points, and in particular is based on real-life slack-limiting factors found to exist between the mounting points. The point-to-point tolerances are easily summed to determine an overall harness length sufficient to create the desired slack and tolerances. The overall length can be optimized for the greatest number of fastener placement options with the least amount of excess harness.