An automatic pipe routing and optimization technology based on engineering constraints

Pipe routing design is an important stage of the pipe manufactory in complex products. To make the pipe routing design more efficient and down the rework rate, an automatic pipe routing and optimization technology based on engineering constraints is introduced in this paper. An automatic pipe routing method which integrate motion planning technology and heuristic algorithm is carried out to design the layout of the pipe system. After the rough design, a pipe routing knowledge database is set up based on first-order predicate calculus. By using the knowledge database, the quality of the pipe routing design is assessed to generate the diagnosis information of pipe routing. The designer can optimize the pipe routing result based on the diagnosis information. By the end, a prototype is developed to validate the method.