A hybrid evolutionary algorithm for tuning a cloth-simulation model

Textile simulation models are notorious for being difficult to tune. The physically based derivations of energy functions, as mostly used for mapping the characteristics of real-world textiles on to simulation models, are labour-intensive and not guarantee satisfactory results. The extremely complex behaviour of textiles requires additional adjustment over a wide-range of parameters in order to achieve realistic reallife behaviour of the model. Furthermore, such derivations might not even be possible when dealing with mass-spring particle system-based models. Since there is no explicit correlation between the physical characteristics of textiles and the stiffnesses of springs that control a model’s behaviour, this remains an unresolved issue. This paper proposes a hybrid evolutionary algorithm (EA), in order to solve this problem. The initial parameters of the model are written in individual’s genes, where the number of genes is predefined for different textile types in order to limit the search-space. By mimicking the evolution processes, the EA is used to search the stability domain of the model to find a set of parameters that persuasively imitate the behaviour of a given real-world textile (e.g. silk, cotton or wool). This evaluation is based on the drape measurement, a characteristic often used when evaluating fabrics within the textile industry. The proposed EA is multi-objective, as textile drape is analysed using different quantifications. Local search is used to heuristically improve convergence towards a solution, while the efficiency of the method is demonstrated in comparison to a simple EA. To the best of our knowledge, this problem is being solved using an EA for the first time. © 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.