Research on an Optimization Method for Cable Layout in Confined Spaces

Cable routing is a pivotal design component for electrical systems and safety-critical engineering fields, such as nuclear propulsion systems, nuclear power plants and aircraft. Scientific and optimized routing schemes are essential for efficient and safe power and signal transmission and for mitigating system failure risks. Previous studies have adopted heuristic search and swarm intelligence optimization algorithms for cable path planning; however, these methods tend to converge to local optima under complex constraints and cannot theoretically guarantee global optimality, failing to address multi-constraint, high-dimensional optimization challenges of confined-space cable routing. This paper proposes a mathematical programming-based systematic optimization model: it first discretizes continuous three-dimensional space into a grid coordinate system and constructs a composite cost field integrating geometric distance and thermal interference, then formulates a multi-objective optimization model considering path length, thermal impact and routing feasibility, which is converted into a single-objective problem via normalized weighting coefficients and solved by exact mathematical programming techniques, yielding a best feasible solution together with a provable lower bound and an optimality gap. When the solver converges within the time limit, global optimality for the discretized model can be certified. Simulation results show the proposed method reduces overall path cost by an average of 31.8% compared with classical algorithms like the A* algorithm, Dijkstra’s algorithm, Rapidly-exploring Random Tree (RRT), Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), and Genetic Algorithm (GA). Furthermore, it cuts decision variables by an average of 70% (up to 82% in complex scenarios) against the 0–1 Integer Linear Programming (ILP) model and the graph-theoretic Multi-Commodity Flow (MCF) model with multi-cost considerations. These results preliminarily validate the favorable solution quality, computational efficiency and engineering applicability of the proposed model for confined-space cable routing optimization.