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.

While level design is a concept commonly used in western game companies, it is veiled in a lack of clear conceptualization. Many research papers on the subject describe the role of level designer as elusive, and there is a great variation in the descriptions used in job listings for the role. This paper aims to identify a set of characteristics for the field of level design, by reviewing literature and analyzing responsibilities and requirements in job listings. To obtain more inclusive and cross-cultural results, interviews were also conducted with Japanese game developers to explain the concept of level design in their industry. By combining the qualitative data from interviews and literature analysis, with the quantitative data from job listings (n=33), the research highlights common denominators for the role of level design, but also demonstrate cultural differences and discrepancies between academia and industry. Thus suggesting gaps in current research as well as culturally. The findings aim to elucidate directions for future research, and promote focus towards the needs of the industry.

We have studied a sea navigation method relying on a digital underwater terrain map and sonar measurements. The method is applicable for both ships and underwater vessels. We have used experimental data to build an underwater map and to investigate the estimation performance. Since the problem is non-linear, due to the measurement relation, we apply a sequential Monte Carlo method, or particle filter, for the state estimation. The fundamental limitations in navigation uncertainty can be described in terms of the Cramer-Rao lower bound, which is interpreted in terms of the inertial navigation system (INS) error, the sensor accuracy and the terrain map excitation. Hence, the Cramer-Rao lower bound can be interpreted and used in the design for INS systems, sensor performance or, if these are given, how much terrain or depth excitation that is needed for use in positioning and navigation.