Concealed Conduit Routing in Building Slabs

Abstract

Concealed pipes are vital facilities for transporting water, air, electricity, and natural gas in modern buildings. These pipes are constructed inside slabs of buildings, and thus conventional piping algorithms, dedicated to arranging exposed pipes in open spaces or on object surfaces, are not suitable for laying out their paths. In this article, an innovative method is presented for designing the concealed conduits of modern buildings. In the proposed piping procedure, the target building is regarded as a framework composed of beams, columns, and slabs. These substructures are encoded in a weighted graph, which serves as the top-level representation of the workspace. Then, these substructures are split into voxels and constitute the bottom-level representation of the workspace. Each concealed pipe is constructed by using a two-stage piping scheme to comply with the representation of the workspace. In the first stage, the slabs containing the terminals of the pipe are located in the top-level representation, and the shortest path connecting these slabs is calculated using Dijkstra’s algorithm. In the second stage, a feasible space is generated by collecting selective voxels in these slabs first. Then, the pipe path is routed inside the feasible space by a shortest-path-finding computation. Next, the pipe surface is generated and represented by using triangle meshes. Finally, the bottom-level representation is modified and the routing process is repeated to lay out the remaining concealed pipes. The experimental results show that the proposed piping procedure efficiently arranges concealed pipes inside buildings of various topologies and internal layouts. As it benefits from the two-level representation and the two-stage routing method, the piping process consumes reasonable computational costs. The paths of the resultant pipes are optimized, and their positions meet the geometrical constraints and safety regulations.