Multiple Path Finding System for Replacement Tasks

Planning alternative multiple carry-in/out paths is essential to the engineering work of replacement tasks in power plant maintenance, adapting to the uncertain 3D environment of the plant building. For this subject, dissimilarity of the planned paths and fast response time for the query are required for a path finding algorithm. Existing path finding algorithms can find exact multiple paths but the differences of found paths are very little. Besides, the computation times are not feasible for a large volume of 3D space such as power plant. In this paper, a novel multiple paths finding algorithm is proposed for dissimilar paths planning with fast response time for the query, realizing interactive operations. Furthermore, performance indices for the path finding is designed with consideration of secure carry-in/out operations in the proposed algorithm. The algorithm outputs crane suspension trajectory avoiding collision with the plant building. The system has been applied to replacement tasks of an existing boiler building of a power plant. The building is expressed by over 5 GB stereo-lithography binary data.