Firefighting Equipment Arrangement Optimization for an Offshore Platform Considering Travel Distances

Abstract

The offshore plant, due to its characteristics, is subject to many restrictions on the material and design of the pipes. Because the design of the firefighting piping depends on the pre-set fire protection design, it is possible to reduce the cost of the piping design by optimizing the arrangement of the firefighting equipment. Existing studies have low accuracy in obtaining service areas under these conditions. In addition, the arrangement optimization problem is generally modeled as a set cover problem (SCP). However, except for the traditional greedy approximation, this problem is not well researched for general solutions. In this paper, first, a modified iterative-deepening search (MIDS), which accurately obtains a service area according to the travel distance in the grid space, is proposed before optimization. Additionally, this paper seeks to define a set cover problem by combining the subsets obtained by MIDS. Second, by using the traditional greedy algorithm, we obtained the initial arrangement of the firefighting equipment. Then, we proposed a method to obtain an approximate optimization solution using a modified greedy method including rearrangement. The validity of the proposed coverage area acquisition and arrangement optimization method is verified by comparing the performance with other algorithms. Finally, this study was applied to the drawings of an actual offshore platform.

Keywords

• offshore platform
• firefighting equipment layout
• arrangement optimization
• set cover problem
• Dijkstra algorithm
• iterative-deepening search