Date of Award
August 2020
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Mechanical Engineering
Committee Member
Georges Fadel
Committee Member
Margaret Wiecek
Committee Member
Joshua Summers
Committee Member
Cameron Turner
Committee Member
Jonathan Cagan
Abstract
The need for designing lighter and more compact systems often leaves limited space for planning routes for the connectors that enable interactions among the system’s components. Finding optimal routes for these connectors in a densely populated environment left behind at the detail design stage has been a challenging problem for decades.
A variety of deterministic as well as heuristic methods has been developed to address different instances of this problem. While the focus of the deterministic methods is primarily on the optimality of the final solution, the heuristics offer acceptable solutions, especially for such problems, in a reasonable amount of time without guaranteeing to find optimal solutions. This study is an attempt to furthering the efforts in deterministic optimization methods to tackle the routing problem in two and three dimensions by focusing on the optimality of final solutions.
The objective of this research is twofold. First, a mathematical framework is proposed for the optimization of the layout of wiring connectors in planar cluttered environments. The problem looks at finding the optimal tree network that spans multiple components to be connected with the aim of minimizing the overall length of the connectors while maximizing their common length (for maintainability and traceability of connectors). The optimization problem is formulated as a bi-objective problem and two solution methods are proposed: (1) to solve for the optimal locations of a known number of breakouts (where the connectors branch out) using mixed-binary optimization and visibility notion and (2) to find the minimum length tree that spans multiple components of the system and generates the optimal layout using the previously-developed convex hull based routing. The computational performance of these methods in solving a variety of problems is further evaluated.
Second, the problem of finding the shortest route connecting two given nodes in a 3D cluttered environment is considered and addressed through deterministically generating a graphical representation of the collision-free space and searching for the shortest path on the found graph. The method is tested on sample workspaces with scattered convex polyhedra and its computational performance is evaluated. The work demonstrates the NP-hardness aspect of the problem which becomes quickly intractable as added components or increase in facets are considered.
Recommended Citation
Masoudi, Nafiseh, "Geometric-based Optimization Algorithms for Cable Routing and Branching in Cluttered Environments" (2020). All Dissertations. 2702.
https://tigerprints.clemson.edu/all_dissertations/2702