Automatic Pipe Routing in Buildings

Abstract

Concealed pipes are widely used to transport water, air, natural gas, and sewage in buildings. In this paper, we propose an algorithm for designing concealed pipes in buildings such that the productivity of construction industry is enhanced. When routing concealed pipes in a building, the walls, floors, and ceilings form the workspace of the piping computation. We treat these slabs as vertices and generate edges between them, based on their connectivity. Consequently, the frame of the building is encoded in a graph, which constitutes the top-level representation of the workspace. Then all the slabs are divided into voxels by using regular grids, and the bottom-level representation of the workspace is created. The pathfinding of a pipe is carried out in two stages. First, the routing process generates a shortest path in the top-level graph to identify the slabs penetrated by the pipe. Then, the routing process creates the detail pipe path by using the voxels of these slabs in the bottom-level representation. Once this pipe has been constructed, the voxels occupied by it are deleted from the workspace and the routing computation is repeated to arrange other pipes.