Pipe Routing Approach for Aircraft Engines Based on Ant Colony Optimization

Aircraft engines usually contain a lot of pipes and cables whose routing design greatly affects engine performance and reliability. In this paper a pipe routing approach for aircraft engines based on ant colony optimization is proposed, which contains improvements in three aspects. First, constraints over aircraft engine pipe routing are formulated and classified with respect to nine aspects. Second, a fan annual mesh of the layout space is developed, and two-mesh division is conducted to store and update environmental information about the layout space. Every unit obtained by the layout space modeling has been assigned a potential value to meet constraints and represent different areas in the layout space. Third, an improved ant colony optimization is developed for pipe routing, which includes the classification of ant colony, rank mechanism updating rule of pheromone intensity, and a dynamic updating rule of heuristic information. Every ant can search for 26 adjacent units in random directions and across layers. Simulation results show that the proposed pipe routing approach is effective. (C) 2015 American Society of Civil Engineers.