Harness Designs > Composite Harnesses > Derivative Group Designs
Derivative Group Designs Overview
You can use derivative groups to create a single formboard diagram from a selected subset of derivatives.
You may want to use derivative groups to improve efficiency where you have many derivatives being built on a “busy” composite formboard. By using this functionality, you can bring together the content of just a subset of derivatives to a single formboard diagram.
This video demonstrates how to use Derivative Groups in this manner.
You create Derivative Groups in Capital Harness Designer, Capital Harness Designer Modular, and Capital Project Manager. See Creating a Derivative Group.
Figure 12 shows an example Derivative Group design “LHD”, which is made up of just the left-hand drive (LHD) derivatives.
Derivative Group designs appear in their own folder in the project browser to differentiate them from other derivative designs.
As it is not the intended use that Derivative Groups are composite designs, the system does not allow you to create new derivatives, derivative groups, function modules or production modules for them, and all such associated right-click actions are hidden.
Figure 12: Example Derivative Group
When you have created your derivative group, running composite breakdown will evaluate the sets of options on the selected child designs and populate the group design / diagram.
Note
All harness engineering processing should be complete before you run Composite Breakdown to ensure the derivative group diagram is created from the most up to date data.
Copy and Revise
The applicable derivatives selectable for a derivative group are only those derivative designs that belong to the same composite parent of the derivative group.
The following tables show the expected results for the revise and copy actions using various combinations of settings for a composite design, its derivative designs and a derivative group design.
The examples assumes a starting harness structure as follows:
- Composite revision A Derivative revision A
Derivative Group revision A Applicable Derivatives revision A
Figure 13: Revise Relationships
Figure 14: Copy Relationships
Composite
Derivative Information Table
You can use styling to display the Composite Derivative Information table on your diagram. The table will display the option information of all the derivatives in the group. See the “Tables” topics in the Capital Diagram Styling User Guide.
Figure 15: Composite Derivative Information Table
Variant
Positions and Lengths
Where there are variant positions defined on a variant length bundle, the composite breakdown process uses the longest variant length, so all variant position nodes can be shown. The formboard designer will then decide what to do in that case.
Where there are no variant positions on a variant length bundle, the composite breakdown process uses the shortest variant length as this is most suitable for use in formboard diagrams.
Parent Topic:
Derivative Group Designs
Capital Harness Designer User Guide, 2512
Unpublished work. © 2025 Siemens
Source: https://docs.sw.siemens.com/en-US/doc/861057055/202410078.capital_hd_user/id5ab0e6c1-8ade-4b31-a4b2-5c7bca2db6a0 · retrieved 2026-07-18