Adaptive Genetic Algorithm Based Ship Pipe Design

Ship pipe design plays a prominent role at the detailed design stage of a ship,and it takes more than fifty percent of design hours.However,duo to the complexity and diversity of constraints in piping systems,depending only on experts' knowledge and experience to achieve favorable layout is time-consuming and inefficient,and the design quality also cannot be guaranteed.Investigating automatic pipe routing method becomes extremely significant,especially the intelligent approach that integrates optimization algorithm and design knowledge.In consideration of the problems mentioned above,environment modeling of layout space,building of pipe routing framework and developing of intelligent design system are mainly studied.The main achievements in this paper are as follows:Simulation model of ship pipe layout space is firstly built.By analyzing the characteristics of the workspace and equipments involved,the solid model of these components are enlarged to achieve the needs of interoperability and maintainability,and a "separation-simplification-recombination" technique is proposed to simplify the equipment model.The workspace is divided into uniform 3D grid cells to build its mathematical model,and the simulation model of layout space is finally built.And the framework of two-point pipe routing method is constructed.Maze algorithm is modified by using the concept of auxiliary point and direction oriented strategy,then it is combined with genetic algorithm.The fixed-length coding method,population initialization,fitness function and genetic operators are defined to construct the framework.Based on the two-point pipe routing algorithm,an approach for branch pipe design is proposed.Coding method of branch pipes,initialization of pipe chromosomes and strategies of crossover and mutation are mainly discussed.And the simulation test verifies the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed approach.At last,an intelligent design system for ship pipe system is developed,and an application example is used to verify the proposed methodology.Matlab and SolidWorks are integrated by using Visual Studio,which realizes the function of automatic setting of parameters,path routing of pipe systems and 3D visualization of optimal pipes.Application example slao demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed methodology and its important guiding significance to actual design.