A Mass-Spring Model Approach for Interactive Simulation of Wire Harnesses

We present a method to simulate wire harnesses interactively, without ignoring physical accurateness. Our method relies on a mass-spring model, which is widely used in such areas as cloth simulation and hair simulation. Although a mass-spring model gives shapes of flexible objects with small computational cost, a considerable disparity of bending and stretching spring coefficients gives rise to serious instabilities of the differential equation to be solved. To solve this problem, we adopted a combination of successive leapfrog integrations and final fast projection to satisfy inextensibility. We applied this technique to simulate 3D industrial product models equipped with 20 to 30 wire harnesses and obtained a good operational response with the required physical accuracy.