SummaryNowadays, the pipe arrangement has been enabled to be more efficient and economical by development and spread of CAD(Computer-Aided Design). However, it is difficult to design a piping layout automatically because there are many regulations and functional design rules which must be satisfied. We propose an automatic routing method for simple pipes including elbows and bends. In a practical design of a piping layout, there are many bends connecting straight eccentric pipes which have gaps within the pipes' diameter. However, no precedence automatic piping algorithm has been taken into account pipelines with such bends. The proposed method finds piping routes making use of not only elbows but the bends in order to minimize costs of the path connecting start point to goal point, while avoiding obstacles such as structures, equipments and the other circuits. In our approach, we regard the piping route design problem as a routing problem in a directed and weighted graph. Note that the nodes in the proposed graph have state variables not only locations but directions of the pipes. This graph can easily express the bends as simple edges, and then the routing algorithm can easily handle the bends. In addition, the presented method has specifications that the sizes of each cell, which is generated by decomposing of a free space, are not restricted within the diameter of the pipe. The routing algorithm uses Dijkstra's method to provide candidate paths. The efficiency of the proposed method is demonstrated through several experiments

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During the ship design, designers have to deal with all pipe-routes in order to generate practical piping layouts composed by the minimum cost value (i.e. interference with obstacles, the length of each pipe-parts, etc.). However, the routing task requires huge work hours because there are many regulations and functional design rules in the field. In this paper, we propose an automatic routing system for multiple pipe-routes. The proposed system aims to solve the complicated multiple routing problems and to improve the design work efficiency. In the routing problem for pipes, there are two major factors having the significant influence to final routing designs: the order of routing search and the selection from candidates of pipe-routes. The routing system is capable of handling these two factors by adopting Touch and Cross method and simulated annealing method. Touch and Cross method is routing algorithm to find candidates including no interference with each path. Simulated annealing method is one of the optimization methods to find a global optimum of a given function in a large search space. By combining these two methods, the routing system can reduce the influence of the search order and the selection problem. Therefore, it is able to find suitable pipe-routes automatically though there are no guarantees to find the best layouts. The routing system also uses Dijkstra's method as a routing method to find the optimal route efficiently. The performance of the system is demonstrated through several simulations.

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