Using the Genetic Design Methodology for Structure Configuration

摘要

Abstract:Human designers and optimization codes are very good at improving the performance of existing designs; however, due to time and resource constraints, human designers tend to limit the range of alternative configurations considered. This paper presents a methodology, called genetic design (GD), to aid the designer by generating viable design alternatives. GD uses formal grammars for artifact description and representation, evaluates the artifacts automatically, and manipulates the representations with genetic programming—like operations. GD can explore a wide breadth of the available design space, though at shallow depth, and presents alternatives to the human designer. The combination of GD's ability to explore the design space and the human engineer's ability to optimize existing configurations promotes the production of viable new design concepts by avoiding the inefficiencies associated with trial‐and‐error methods. This paper explores one application of GD: the design of simple truss br