Where natural evolution has lead to a wide variety of coexisting species, evolutionary algorithms tend to end up with nearly identical individuals. Techniques known as niching aim to avoid this. However, they often depend on a threshold parameter, known as the sharing radius or niche radius. It serves as a similarity threshold. This is a critical, problem-dependent parameter. How to set it is k...

The recently proposed random cost method is applied to the topology optimization of trusses. Its performance is compared to previous genetic algorithm and evolution strategy simulations. Random cost turns out to be an optimization method with attractive features. In comparison to the genetic algorithm approach of Hajela, Lee and Lin, random cost turns out to be simpler and more efficient. Furth...

Computational cost of metaheuristic based optimum design algorithms grows excessively with structure size. This results in computational inefficiency of modern metaheuristic algorithms in tackling optimum design problems of large scale structural systems. This paper attempts to provide a computationally efficient optimization tool for optimum design of large scale steel frame structures to AISC...