ABSTRACT
ABSTRACT: Pipe routing plays an important role in many industries, especially for the ship building design. In this paper, a rectilinear branch pipe routing method for automatic generation of the optimal branch pipe routes based on a 3D network and improved Genetic Algorithm (GA) for ships is proposed. By extending the 2D escape graph, a 3D network graph is constructed first. It can model the 3D constrained layout space and reduce the storage space effectively. Then, an improved genetic algorithm is employed to solve the rectilinear branch pipe routing optimization problem on the basis of the network graph. Fixed-length coding method, one-point crossover, and location mutation are adopted to improve the computational efficiency. Finally, a case study of pipe routing for a ship engine room is conducted to validate the performance of the proposed method.
