Pipe route design (PRD) is to design an appropriate route meeting various constraints and objectives from various candidates, which is a time-consuming and difficult task even to a skilled designer. This paper proposes a new method for PRD based on the grid method and particle swarm optimization (PSO). First, a modified particle swarm optimization (MPSO) is proposed to improve the performance of PSO. Next, the paper adopts the grid theory to establish the workspace model and designs a novel fixed-length encoding mechanism based on grid to overcome the shortcomings of variable-length encoding, then puts forward the evaluation function for PRD. Finally, the paper adopts MPSO to find the optimal path. Simulation results show this method is feasible and effective.
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