Automatic designing system for piping and instruments arrangement including branches of pipes

Automatic design of piping layout is challenging since it is composed of several numerical and/or combinational optimization problems, e.g., routing problems of pipes including branches, and arrangement problems of equipments. This paper presents a new approach that the branches of pipes are considered to be a variety of equipment. Accordingly, the pipe routing problems are fairly simplified by removing the branches, and it derives a lot of efficient algorithms to solve the pipe arrangement problems. One is a multi-objective genetic algorithm (MOGA) in which the gene represents both the locations of the equipments and the arrangement of the pipes. And a new crossover operation which merges two different piping layouts is proposed. To provide a fairly good initial population for the MOGA, a new heuristics making use of self-organization techniques to arrange equipments is proposed. The efficiency of the approach is demonstrated through two experiments, one is a designing problem including five valves, one pump, and five branches, and the other includes seven valves, one pump, and six branches.