Optimisation of pipeline route in the presence of obstacles based on a least cost path algorithm and laplacian smoothing

Subsea pipeline route design is a crucial task for the offshore oil and gas industry, and the route selected can significantly affect the success or failure of an offshore project. Thus, it is essential to design pipeline routes to be eco-friendly, economical and safe. Obstacle avoidance is one of the main problems that affect pipeline route selection. In this study, we propose a technique for designing an automatic obstacle avoidance. The Laplacian smoothing algorithm was used to make automatically generated pipeline routes fairer. The algorithms were fast and the method was shown to be effective and easy to use in a simple set of case studies.