E-engine

Automatic Schematic Generation Engine for Automotive & Aerospace Tools

E-engine™ is an option to Nlview® that allows automatic generation of E/E architecture schematic diagrams and wiring harness schematics. The E-engine software library comes with a powerful API interface and enables software developers to easily build automotive & aerospace development and service tools (Windows or Linux) or cloud based applications.

Automatic, Scenario-Specific Schematic Generation for Smart Vehicle Services

The complexity of modern automotive and aerospace electronic systems has exploded, creating a major problem for vehicle service operations. Technicians and mechanics must wade through hundreds of pages of incomprehensible, sometimes out-of-date, static, documentation, attempting to apply complex schematics to unfamiliar repair scenarios. This is a significant challenge for automotive and aerospace manufacturers where the effective maintenance of their products is a key differentiator. The initial documentation production, applying document revisions, and providing the flexibility to handle vehicle variations all require a considerable investment.

Concept Engineering's E-engine solves these issues by providing a documentation and debugging solution that automatically renders schematics specifically to individual maintenance scenarios. The schematics are generated from a database that is converted directly from original CAD data or proprietary data, saving authoring effort, eliminating a source of errors, and allowing for easy revisions.

• Easy to Understand: Visual, clear, compact schematics, rendered dynamically for specific repair scenarios for fast issue resolution
• Easy to Use: Smart, interactive documentation, for easy installation, efficient updates, and variation handling
• Easy to Produce: Database created directly from CAD design data or proprietary data for fast, error-free, easily-maintained documentation
• Two way communication with host application for cross probing etc.
• Automatic schematic generation for vehicle and aircraft electronics (E/E architecture)

E-engine is based on Concept Engineering's unique schematic visualization and rendering technology, initially developed for complex semiconductor electronic design automation. The technology allows for repair scenarios to automatically drive visualizations of a vehicle's electronics, wiring harness, connectivity and other key information, allowing the problem sources to be rapidly identified.

Smart Visualization for Development and Debug Tools

Reliable detail on an electronic system enables the fast design and debug of issues. E-engine provides Automotive & Aerospace development tools with the ability to quickly dial up specific views, easily inspect them for causal affects, and then link to the next debug view to accelerate the smooth diagnosis of problems. This leads to faster development and the elimination of problems in the final product.

Easy to Understand: Visual, clear, compact dynamically rendered schematics

Concept Engineering's schematics are renowned for their clear, crisp visual depiction of complex electronic components. Used in many products for semiconductor CAD, the schematic generation engine has been carefully designed to provide relevant information in as readable a manner as possible. The internal rendering engine provides the unique capability for the schematics to automatically redraw themselves based upon the technician's requirements, allowing for a rapid focus on problem areas to identify and repair issues. E-engine is a diagnosis power tool that greatly accelerates the maintenance process.

Easy to Use: Smart, interactive, web-based documentation

E-engine is available for Windows, Linux platforms and online through web browsers, providing access from a range of computer and mobile devices, with no installation headaches. In addition, maintenance of the documentation is vastly improved on the online system, which ensures that technicians will always be working with the latest schematics. Manufacturers can be sure that no outdated versions of the drawings are being used to repair their vehicles. In addition, the myriad of vehicle variations can be easily handled, allowing service manuals to be relevant to the particular vehicle and problem at hand.

Easy to Produce: Database created directly from CAD design data

Documentation authoring is a necessary headache for automotive and aerospace manufacturers, who must apply a significant level of resources to provide service center information. A direct translation from the designers' CAD systems to the E-engine EDB database ensures the fast production of accurate, error-free documents that may be updated immediately when any change is necessary. E-engine revolutionizes the entire process of authoring, delivering, and maintaining service documentation to service centers worldwide.

Easy Integration into Automotive & Aerospace Applications

The production-proven API (Application Programming Interface) provides a simple set of commands, callbacks and configuration properties and makes it easy to exchange data and information with software applications. The E-engine software library is available for the most common GUI development environments and easily fits into most modern software development flows.

Supporting Model-Based Development (MBSE)

Abstraction is inevitable in modern automotive and aerospace development tools, driven by the rapid technological pace of the environment. As already witnessed in the semiconductor industry, abstraction needs to be tempered with systems that make it easy for engineers to maintain their connection with the real electronics. This leads to a combined methodology where abstraction is used to efficiently describe functionality, while smart automated circuit visualization engines, such as E-engine, allow for easy system analysis and debug. E-engine can easy be integrated into model-based development tools and allows on-the-fly automatic rendering and visual exploration of system models and electrical connectivity.

Widest Platform Availability

E-engine is an option to Nlview and allows automatic generation of E/E architecture schematic diagrams. E-engine is available for many GUI development platforms including: Qt, Java, wxWidgets, Tcl/Tk, Perl/Tk, MFC and JavaScript (runs inside Web browsers) and as a GUI-less version. For more details, see the main Nlview Widgets page.

At a Glance