Many methods have been developed for structural size and configuration optimization in which cross-sectional areas are usually assumed to be continuous. In most practical structural engineering design problems, however, the design variables are discrete. This paper proposes two efficient structural optimization methods based on the harmony search (HS) heuristic algorithm that treat both discret...

Node cooperation can protect wireless networks from eavesdropping by using the physical characteristics of wireless channels rather than cryptographic methods. Allocating the proper amount of power to cooperative nodes is a challenging task. In this paper, we use three cooperative nodes, one as relay to increase throughput at the destination and two friendly jammers to degrade eavesdropper&rsqu...

The main aim of the present paper is to propose efficient multi-objective optimization algorithms (MOOAs) to tackle truss structure optimization problems. The proposed meta-heuristic algorithms are based on the firefly algorithm (FA) and bat algorithm (BA), which have been recently developed for single-objective optimization. In order to produce a well distributed Pareto front, some improvement...

in this paper, a multi-objective reconfiguration problem has been solved simultaneously by a modified ant colony optimization algorithm. two objective functions, real power loss and energy not supplied index (ens), were utilized. multi-objective modified ant colony optimization algorithm has been generated by adding non-dominated sorting technique and changing the pheromone updating rule of ori...

The Economic Load Dispatch (ELD) problems in power generation systems are to reduce the fuel cost by reducing the total cost for the generation of electric power. This paper presents an efficient Modified Firefly Algorithm (MFA), for solving ELD Problem. The main objective of the problems is to minimize the total fuel cost of the generating units having quadratic cost functions subjected to lim...

vehicle routing problem (vrp) is one of the major problems in the transportation and distribution planning. in the most previous studies, the objective of vrp models was distance and vehicle related costs. however in many industrial cases along with routing distance, vehicle loading amount is a factor of cost function. in this paper, we formulate a mixed integer non-linear programming (minlp) m...

In this paper, a new method is proposed for solving the data clustering problem using Cat Swarm Optimization (CSO) algorithm based on chaotic behavior. The problem of data clustering is an important section in the field of the data mining, which has always been noted by researchers and experts in data mining for its numerous applications in solving real-world problems. The CSO algorithm is one ...

The use of meta-heuristic optimization methods have become quite generic in the past two decades. This paper provides a theoretical investigation to find optimum design parameters of the Stirling heat engines using a recently presented nature-inspired method namely the gray wolf optimization (GWO). This algorithm is utilized for the maximization of the output power/thermal efficiency as well as...

A novel hybrid method for tracking multiple indistinguishable maneuvering targets using a wireless sensor network is introduced in this paper. The problem of tracking the location of targets is formulated as a Maximum Likelihood Estimation. We propose a hybrid optimization method, which consists of an iterative and a heuristic search method, for finding the location of targets simultaneously. T...

The solutions used to solve bi-level congestion pricing problems are usually based on heuristic network optimization methods which may not be able to find the best solution for these type of problems. The application of meta-heuristic methods can be seen as viable alternative solutions but so far, it has not received enough attention by researchers in this field. Therefore, the objective of thi...