The Ant Colony Optimization for Ship Pipe Route Design in 3D Space

Ship pipe route design (SPRD) is an area, which requires experienced experts because of its complexity and the large search space involved. It is one of the stages of ship design that remains not automated completely. Ant Colony Optimisation (ACO) is a novel population-based evolutionary search technique to solve optimisation problems by using principle of pheromone information. This paper describes a study of automatic SPRD using ACO. It includes the constructions of appropriate mathematical model for SPRD and ant colony optimisation with dynamic local search (ACODLS) solving SPRD in three-dimensional space. Simulation results indicate that the performance and CPU time of the proposed algorithm are competitive with other existing algorithms used to generate solutions to the SPRD.