Due to the large quantity of equipmentin environmental control rooms, it is necessary to optimize the equipment layout to save space while guaranteeing normal maintenance. Therefore, an automatic spatial optimization approach is proposed to optimize the layout of central chiller plants. A repulsion model is adopted to quantify the rationality of equipment layout, which was regarded as the optimization objective. The differential evolution algorithm is utilized to adjust the equipment layout within a given space for the lowest optimization objective. Moreover, this approach repeatedly reduces the given space to minimize the space occupation of the central chiller plant. A real metro station environmental control room was taken as the case to verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Results indicate that the proposed approach reduced the occupied area of the equipment from 105 m² to 100.1 m², with reasonable equipment spacing maintained. Therefore, the proposed approach is able to optimize equipment layout for metro station environmental control rooms, thereby achieving room space saving and reasonable equipment spacing.

rail transit  /  repulsion model  /  metro station  /  heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning system  /  equipment room layout  /  automatic optimization