A particle swarm optimization based approach for ship pipe route design

Ship pipe route design (SPRD) is to search the near optimal pipe routes that meet various constraints and objectives in a constrained ship space, which is one of the most time-consuming and difficult process in ship production. This paper proposes an automatic approach for solving the SPRD problem based on the grid theory and particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm. The fitness functions which are used in the PSO algorithm are formulated to evaluate the engineering objectives and constraints. A fixed-length particle encoding is improved according to the characteristics of ship pipe routing in 3-D space to overcome the shortcomings of variable-length encoding. Mutation operation is combined with the computing process of PSO to avoid the problem of local optimum and to accelerate the convergence rate. Based on the proposed algorithm, the multi-swarms optimization with co-evolution mechanism is applied to solve the problem of multiple pipes and branch pipe routing. The simulations of pipe routing examples are conducted by using VC++ and OpenGL, which demonstrate the feasibility and efficiency of the proposed algorithm. Results show that our approach can route the most common variations of ship pipes automatically under certain constraints in 3-D space. Moreover, the approach can also be applied to other similar path-planning or pipe-routing problems.