Fast Path Finding System with GPGPU Computing for Replacement Tasks in Plant Maintenance.

Plant constructors maintain the performance of plant by health diagnosis and replacements of deteriorated components. The maintenance business becomes one of the important revenue sources for the constructors because profit rate of the maintenance business sometimes becomes much higher than that of new plant construction. To respond this business requirement, a fast automatic path finding system for replacement tasks has been proposed. The system realizes interactive planning operations for a large size of plant 3D-CAD model data. That is, the algorithm finds optimal carry-out/carry-in paths for the replacement tasks automatically, by a collision configuration posture map of the replacement component at each point in a carry-out/carry-in path. Since the creation of those maps take a huge number of calculation steps, it is processed by a parallel computing process on GPGPU hardware. And some experimental results revealed the proposed algorithm is over 200 times faster than a conventional serial computing process. Finally, the proposed algorithm realized the interactive planning operation. Today, this research result has been utilized in multiple power plant sites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]