Route Planning Wizard: Basic Concept and Its Implementation

• Authors: Teruaki Ito
• Venue: IEA/AIE '02 Proceedings of the 15th international conference on Industrial and engineering applications of artificial intelligence and expert systems: developments in applied artificial intelligence
• Year: 2002

Route planning is one of the design problems and studies in various application areas, such as building/factory layout design, robotics, automobile navigation, VLSI design, etc. Route planning is to design an appropriate route from various candidates in terms of various perspectives, which is a time-consuming and difficult task even to a skilled designer. The author has proposed an approach of genetic algorithm (GA) to pipe route planning, and has reported the basic idea and its prototype system. Although the prototype system can generate a candidate route after the convergence of route planning process, its performance was found to heavily rely on the parameters and constraint conditions. For better performance, the previous paper proposed heuristics which was developed to narrow the search space and to improve the performance of GA engine as a preprocessor. Considering several issues we had in the past research, the paper proposes our new approach for chromosome generation, which partitions the design space, put random nodes to each partition, pick up nodes for connection, generates connection routes, set up network using these node, design routes from the network. Since we redesigned definition of chromosome from flexible length to fix length, GA operations became simpler and easier, and calculation time for design was drastically reduced. We have also modified and extended several functions in GUI modules, and implemented a prototype system called Route Planning Wizard. This paper describes basic ideas and implementation for our route planning method, then presents some experimental results using road roadmap data and maze problem to show the validity of our approach.