This study is devoted to discrete sizing optimization of truss structures employing an efficient discrete evolutionary meta-heuristic algorithm which uses the Newton gradient-based method as its updating scheme and it is named here as Newton Meta-heuristic Algorithm (NMA). In order to enable the NMA population-based meta-heuristic to effectively explore the discrete design space, a term contain...

Deterring the optimum design of large-scale structures is a difficult task. Great number of design variables, largeness of the search space and controlling great number of design constraints are major preventive factors in performing optimum design of large-scale truss structures in a reasonable time. Meta-heuristic algorithms are known as one of the useful tools to d...

Hyper-heuristics are (meta-)heuristics that operate at a high level to choose or generate a set of low-level (meta-)heuristics to solve difficult search and optimisation problems. Evolutionary algorithms are well-known natureinspired meta-heuristics that simulate Darwinian evolution. In this article, we introduce an evolutionary-based hyper-heuristic in which a set of low-level heuristics compe...

Earthquake time history records are required to perform dynamic nonlinear analyses. In order to provide a suitable set of such records, they are scaled to match a target spectrum as introduced in the well-known design codes. Corresponding scaling factors are taken similar in practice however, optimizing them reduces extra-ordinary economic charge for the seismic design. In the present work a ne...

A charged system search algorithm (CSS) is applied to the optimal cost design of water distribution networks. This algorithm is inspired by the Coulomb and Gauss’s laws of electrostatics in physics. The CSS utilizes a number of charged particles which influence each other based on their fitness values and their separation distances considering the governing law of Coulomb. The well-known benchm...

in present paper, a point to point optimal path is planned for a mobile manipulator with flexible links and joints. for this purpose, a perfect dynamic modeling is performed for mobile manipulators considering large deformation in links, shear effects, elastic joints, effect of gravitation, and non-holonomic constraints. to study large deformation of links, non-linear relation of displacement-s...

Meta-heuristic methods represent very powerful tools for dealing with hard combinatorial optimization problems. However, real life instances usually cannot be treated efficiently in "reasonable" computing times. Moreover, a major issue in metaheuristic design and calibration is to make them robust, i.e., to provide high performance solutions for a variety of problem settings. Parallel meta-heur...

Software engineers are frequently faced with tasks that can be expressed as optimization problems. To support them with automation, search-based model-driven engineering combines the abstraction power of models with the versatility of meta-heuristic search algorithms. While current approaches in this area use genetic algorithms with xed mutation operators to explore the solution space, the e ci...

economic dispatch with valve point effect and prohibited operating zones (pozs) is a non-convex and discontinuous optimization problem. harmony search (hs) is one of the recently presented meta-heuristic algorithms for solving optimization problems, which has different variants. the performances of these variants are severely affected by selection of different parameters of the algorithm. intel...

In combinatorial solution spaces Iterated Local Search turned out to be exceptionally successful. The question arises: is the Iterated Local Search heuristic also able to improve the optimization process in real-valued solution spaces? This paper introduces a hybrid meta-heuristic based on Iterated Local Search and Powell’s optimization method combined with elements from stochastic search in re...