Automatic design for pipe arrangement considering valve operationally

We propose a novel evaluation method of valve operationality for pipe-arrangement design, and multi-objective genetic algorithms (GAs) suitable for the pipe-arrangement problems are developed. The pipe-arrangement design in shipbuilding requires not only to arrange all pipes without interference but also to make space from pathways to valves so that crew can access the valves. For this reason, it needs sophisticated skill, and is considered that numerical evaluation for pipe-arrangement designs is difficult. To evaluate pipe-operationality, we propose a recursive-fill algorithm to judge whether the arranged valves are accessible by crew or not. In the proposed genetic algorithms, only the parameters of location and directions of valves are encoded, and the other parameters are generated by a modification operators that are similar to local-search algorithms. The proposed approach is demonstrated through computational experiments that contain five valves, one pump and five branches in the diagram, and remarks are provided for applying this methodology to practical pipe-arrangement design problems.