Industrial pipelines data generator

The construction of industrial projects involves fabricating and installing massive quantities of pipelines. The design data of pipelines is complex, usually unique for each project and not easily available to researchers and the public for confidentiality reasons. As a result, an industrial pipelines data generator able to realistically simulate pipelines structures will lessen the dependence on real-life data. This article describes an industrial pipelines data generator that was developed using topological and physical properties of pipelines from real industrial projects. This generator can simulate the properties (the type of component, length, diameter, running direction, and the connectivity relationships between components) of real industrial pipelines. Its application in construction engineering and management research, more specifically in the experimental analysis of an optimization algorithm, was described by the authors in previous work [1]. The data generator can be used to develop benchmark problem instances for optimization problems and for simulation studies of construction operations in industrial projects.