Network Flow based approaches for the Pipelines Routing Problem in Naval Design

TL;DR

This paper introduces a network flow-based methodology for optimal pipeline routing in naval design, incorporating technical constraints and employing advanced algorithms, validated through computational experiments and a real-world case study.

Contribution

It presents a novel multicommodity network flow model and efficient solution algorithms specifically tailored for the complex pipeline routing problem in naval engineering.

Findings

Effective pipeline routing solutions demonstrated on real-world naval case

The proposed algorithms outperform existing methods in computational efficiency

Validated model ensures feasible and cost-effective pipeline layouts

Abstract

In this paper we propose a general methodology for the optimal automatic routing of spatial pipelines motivated by a recent collaboration with Ghenova, a leading Naval Engineering company. We provide a minimum cost multicommodity network flow based model for the problem incorporating all the technical requirements for a feasible pipeline routing. A branch-and-cut approach is designed and different matheuristic algorithms are derived for solving efficiently the problem. We report the results of a battery of computational experiments to assess the problem performance as well as a case study of a real-world naval instance provided by our partner company.