Traction toolbox

Context

Sizing a traction motor and its inverter starts from the vehicle: mass, cycle, gradient, and duty determine what the drive has to deliver.

Constraint

Tools like this accumulate as spreadsheets and scripts around one particular project. The assumptions end up buried in cells, the source material is often licensed or otherwise restricted, and the result cannot be reproduced by anyone who was not there at the time.

Contribution

I am rebuilding the vehicle-driven traction-system design tool as a Python package in which a study is a declared configuration, executed by a command, writing its output to a build directory.

Approach

Restricted source assets stay outside version control while the plan that references them stays inside it, so the rebuild is auditable without redistributing material that cannot be redistributed. A study is identified and re-runnable rather than existing only as its most recent set of results.

Outcome

A sizing result can be regenerated from its inputs, which is what makes it reviewable by someone other than the person who produced it.

Evidence

The work is held in a private repository. The reproducible study path and the separation of restricted assets are documented there.