A comparison of search mechanisms for structural optimization

摘要

In the majority of structural engineering optimization problems, the objective is to minimize the cost of the structure. These problems use a variety of objective functions formulating cost as a function of the variables involved in the design of the structure. They also use a number of search mechanisms ranging from an exhaustive search to several heuristic searches. Typical search mechanisms include tabu search, simulated annealing, genetic algorithms, and branch-and-bound. The goal of this paper is to compare some of the search mechanisms in the light of their applicability to structural engineering optimization. Since practical structural engineering problems have discrete variables, only those search mechanisms capable of solving discrete structural optimization problems are considered.