Multi-pipe Routing in Bundles for Aero-engine using MOPSO

Abstract

Complex equipment such as aero-engine commonly contains a number of pipes. Appropriately routing these pipes poses a considerable challenge to complex product developments. In some cases, pipes need to be paved in bundles to save space, improve stability and obtain artistic configurations. In this paper, a bundled pipe routing method for aero-engine based on Multi-Objective Particle Swarm Optimization (MOPSO) is presented. Firstly, space modeling and problem description are introduced. Subsequently, the individual encoding for bundled routing is designed, where the nodes of a reference pipe is selected as particle encoding, and the coordinates of other pipe nodes are obtained according to geometrical constraints such as pipe spacing and diameters. Further, objective function formulation and constraint processing method are given. By using MOPSO, the Pareto set in which pipes are paved in bundles on routing layers are solved. Finally, some routing examples on a simplified CAD piping model are performed to demonstrate the feasibility of the presented method.

Literature Survey on Automatic Pipe Routing

“…Research on APR is often related to pipe routing in ship design [1,2,8,9], aeroengine design [10][11][12][13], plant layout design [6,[14][15][16], cable routing [17][18][19][20] and water or gas distributing systems [21][22][23][24]. Nonetheless, there are many more domains where pipe routing is essential, for example, Mechanical, Electrical and Plumbing (MEP) engineering [25,26], telecommunication satellites [27], electromechanical products [28], automobile underhood pipe assembly [29] and encapsulated oil pipes in turbines [30].…”

“…4.4). Other methods that are used are: minimizing average bend angles [13] and using a discrete set of bend angles (i.e., a finite bend catalog) [62]. • Parallel routing: For construction purposes, it is often the case that pipes should be routed close to each other such that they can use the same pipe supports.…”

“…Even though they do not implement this method themselves, it has been used by more recent papers for routing in a space with limited resources. Both Zhao et al [13] and Dong and Bian [8] make assumptions that certain sets of pipe bundles are provided to attempt to route these pipes as parallel as possible. Yuan et al [37] uses a clustering method to retrieve sets of pipes that should be routed as macro-pipe.…”

“…These key points are connected using basic styles with the help of insertion points such as to impose orthogonality. Zhao et al [13] use multi-objective PSO (MOPSO) for continuous multi-pipe routing while minimizing length, pipe smoothness and maximizing parallel pipe routing. Different sets of comparable solutions are provided by clustering the non-dominated sets of the multi-objective results.…”

“…Fig 13. An example in which the same pipe is routed using detailed routing (a) and (b) and global routing (c) and (d)…”