GAPRUS: Three-Dimensional Pipe Routing Using Genetic Algorithms and Tessellated Objects
Sunand Sandurkar, Wei Chen, Georges M. Fadel · 1997
Abstract Pipe routing is the technique of developing collision-free routes for pipes between two locations in an environment scattered with obstacles. In the past, research has been primarily focused on the use of deterministic optimization techniques to derive the optimal route. Computational efficiency of deterministic techniques is low for highly nonlinear and sometimes discontinuous problems like the pipe routing problem. Besides, due to limitations in the representation of 3-dimensional geometry, the shapes of obstacles have been restricted to primitives. In this paper we present a novel approach to overcome these limitations. A non-deterministic optimization approach based on Genetic Algorithms is proposed to generate pipe routing solution sets with a high computational efficiency. Representation of the objects and pipes in the tessellated format offers huge benefits in computation as well as adaptability. We demonstrate the versatility of our approach and its ability to accommodate and solve problems involving 3-D freeform obstacles.