The failure probability of the structures is one of the challenging problems in structural engineering. To obtain the reliability index introduced by Hasofer and Lind, one needs to solve a nonlinear equality constrained optimization problem. In this study, four of the most recent metaheuristic algorithms are utilized for finding the design point and the failure probability of problems with cont...

This paper deals with an interval-oriented approach to solve general interval constrained optimization problems. Generally, this type of problems has infinitely many compromise solutions. The aim of this approach is to obtain one of such solutions with higher accuracy and lower computational cost. The proposed algorithm is nothing but a different kind of branch and bound algorithm with multi-se...

Duality is an important notion for constrained optimization which provides a theoretical foundation for a number of constraint decomposition schemes such as separable programming and for deriving lower bounds in space decomposition algorithms such as branch and bound. However, the conventional duality theory has the fundamental limit that it leads to duality gaps for nonconvex optimization prob...

We introduce a new generation of depth-first Branch-and-Bound algorithms that explore the AND/OR search tree using static and dynamic variable orderings for solving general constraint optimization problems. The virtue of the AND/OR representation of the search space is that its size may be far smaller than that of a traditional OR representation, which can translate into significant time saving...

Distributed constraint optimization (DCOP) problems are a popular way of formulating and solving agent-coordination problems. A DCOP problem is a problem where several agents coordinate their values such that the sum of the resulting constraint costs is minimal. It is often desirable to solve DCOP problems with memory-bounded and asynchronous algorithms. We introduce Branch-and-Bound ADOPT (BnB...

Various techniques have been proposed for incorporating constraints in interval branch and bound algorithms for global optimization. However, few reports of practical experience with these techniques have appeared to date. Such experimental results appear here. The underlying implementation includes use of an approximate optimizer combined with a careful tesselation process and rigorous verific...

This study has been inspired by the paper "An efficient 3D topology optimization code written in MATLAB” written by Liu and Tovar (2014) demonstrating that SIMP-based three-dimensional (3D) topology optimization of continuum structures can be implemented in 169 lines of MATLAB code. Based on the above paper, we show here that, by simple and easy-to-understand modificati...

The Constraint Problems usually addressed fall into one of two models: the Constraint Satisfaction Problem (CSP) and the Constraint Optimization Problem (COP). However, in many real-life applications, more functions should be optimized at the same time, and solutions are ranked by means of a Partial Order. Also, when dealing with Null values, the solution set is ranked through a Partial Order, ...

Random sampling is an efficient method to deal with constrained optimization problems in computational geometry. In a first step, one finds the optimal solution subject to a random subset of the constraints; in many cases, the expected number of constraints still violated by that solution is then significantly smaller than the overall number of constraints that remain. This phenomenon can be ex...