A pipe route design methodology by imitating human imaginal thinking

Pipe system design like aero-engine, not only a typical NP-hard problem in limited 3D space, must also extraordinarily depend on human experience. This paper presents a methodology for designing compact pipe systems by fully imitating human's imaginal thinking based on image. The feasible workspace is represented as images of the holistic layout of pipes on the basis of human experience. The improved visible graph imitating human pipe-routing behaviour is conducted to form possible edge sequence tree. Moreover, the global optimal pipe path is generated from the tree. The simulation demonstrated the effectiveness of the pipe route design methodology. (C) 2010 CIRP.