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In view of various objectives and complex constraints in ship pipe route design (SPRD), the previous studies often convert the problem into a single objective optimization consisting of several weighted routing objectives, which cannot generate rich references for designers. In addition, the current CAD systems only provide an environment for manual design and simple automatic route design, resulting in low work performance and a huge workload. Therefore, this paper presents a new ship pipe route design method based on multi-objective ant colony optimization (MOACO). Firstly, the mathematical model and multi-objective definition of SPRD are formulated, and then the key technologies of the modified algorithm are introduced in detail, e.g., ant moving direction, heuristic information, pheromone update rules, tabu search and step backward strategy et al. On this basis, the MOACO framework and its internal ant routing process are presented. To route multiple pipes and branched pipes, a combination method based on Pareto solutions and human choice is given. Finally, the feasibility and efficiency of the proposed method are verified by the simulation and actual routing cases. • The MOACO can provide more reference solutions than the traditional methods, which satisfies pipe engineers better. • Compared with NSGA2, MOACO does not integrate other path-finding algorithm, nor does it need the help of connection points. • The idea of MOACO for solving SPRD have some generality, and it can be used to solve pipe route design in other fields. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]