Automated Pipe Routing Optimization for Ship Machinery

In the shipbuilding industry, market competition is currently operating in an intense state. To be able to strive in the global market, the shipbuilders must able to produce ships that are more efficient and can be constructed in a relatively short amount of time. The piping layouts in the engine room requires a lot of time for the designer to design the best possible route and in a way are not the most efficient route. This paper presents an automatic piping support system in the ship’s engine room based on the Dijkstra’s algorithm of pathfinding method. The proposed method is focused on finding the shortest possible route with a consideration of the following things: cost of the bend pipe, cost of the crossing pipe, cost reduction by pipe support, restriction on piping, reduction of calculation time, and design procedure of piping route. Dijkstra’s shortest path algorithm is adopted to find the shortest path route between the start and goal point that is determined based on the layout of the ship’s engine room. Genetic algorithm is adopted to decide the sequence of the pipe execution. The details of the proposed method are explained in this paper. This paper also discusses the application of the proposed method on an actual ship and evaluates its effectiveness.