A CAD system development for pipe and cable planning

This paper designs and develops a pipe planning CAD system based on MATLAB and UG software. The geometric information of planning space and terminals are extracted by using UG/Open GRIP. The pipe and cable path planning is conducted using some existing automatic routing algorithms in a MATLAB system, and then the final computation results are transferred back to the UG system for visualization of pipe layouts. The date transmission between MATLAB and UG systems are implemented by TXT text files. By using this system, academic researchers and practitioners in pipe engineering areas can efficiently implement and demonstrate various designed routing algorithms.