Mechanization of spatial reasoning for automatic pipe layout design

Artificial Intelligence has been very active in developing high-level symbolic reasoning paradigms that have resulted in practical expert systems. However, with a few exceptions, it has paid little attention to the automation of spatial reasoning. On the other hand, spatial reasoning has attracted the interest of several researchers in Robotics. One of the important problems that have been investigated is motion planning, and very significant results have been obtained. This paper describes an implemented system for designing pipe layouts automatically using motion planning techniques. It introduces a new approach to pipe layout design automation in which pipe routes are treated as trajectories left behind by rigid objects (‘robots’). We have implemented this approach in a basic Pipe Router that is described in detail in this paper. We have extended this router in order to make it capable of treating a variety of other constraints which are typical of practical pipe layout design problems. These constraints relate to the process carried out in the pipes, to the design of their mechanical support, and to the constructability and the ease of operation and maintenance of the designed pipe systems.