design process around it additionally the two dimensional representation helps produce a full scale representation of the layout of the board 14 on which the wire harness will be built fig2 shows a flowchart of a method for generating the two dimensional orthogonal representation of the wire harness in process box 30 the three dimensional data is received such as from mcad system 22 in process block 32 the backbone of the system is determined as further described below the backbone is the starting point and is centrally located in the representation so that readability of the two dimensional representation is maximized a further description of the backbone determination is below in regards to fig3 6 in process block 34 the two dimensional representation of the wire harness is automatically generated with a majority of the branches arranged perpendicularly such an orthogonal view is shown in fig8 and is described in further detail below fig3 shows a flowchart of a method for determining the backbone of the wire harness in process block 60 a degree e g a number is assigned to each node the degree is representative of the number of branches connected to the node in process block 62 all degrees that have a value of u201c 1 u201d are decremented to u201c 0 u201d and removed process block 64 in process block 66 all degrees associated with the nodes are decremented an amount equal to the number of branches that were removed from that node in process block 68 a check is made to determine whether there are two nodes that have a degree equal to u201c 1 u201d if so the method ends at process block 70 if not the process continues and is.