The "easiest" way to find the cheapest set of pipe sizes is to test all of the possible combinations exhaustively, and report back the lowest cost option found.

This has the advantage that it is clearly conclusive - there can be no argument that a cheaper alternative exists if every possible alternative was shown to have higher cost. Unfortunately, this method is extremely impractical for any reasonable sized problem. The number of required analyses to find the current value of the Objective is related to the number of design variables and how many unique discrete sizes each variable can have.

In the context of ANS, this is the number of Independently Sized Pipes, and the number of selections in the Candidate Set, assuming there is one set for the model.

If we have only 3 independently sized pipes, and can only choose from 3 different pipe sizes, then we would need to solve 27 unique hydraulic models, which could be manageable by hand.

However, if we have 12 independently sized pipes, and can choose from 6 different pipe sizes, we suddenly have over 2 billion unique models to solve. If we could test 50 models every second, this would take over a year to complete - and it is still a relatively small system!

Due to the clear impracticality of this method, it is not used in ANS.