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...

Structural  design  optimization  usually  deals  with  multiple  conflicting  objectives  to  obtain the minimum construction cost, minimum weight, and maximum safety of the final design. Therefore, finding the optimum design is hard and time-consuming for  such problems.  In this paper, we borrow the basic concept of multi-criterion decision-making and combine it with  Particle  Swarm  Optimi...

In the structural optimization problem, the aim is to decrease the amount of structural costs and weight, but the safety of platform should not violate the individual limits enforced by offshore codes. The outer diameter and thickness of members are two important variables in the optimization process and their final dimensions should be obtained according to the optimization algorithms such as ...

in this paper, matlab code for a recently developed meta-heuristic methodology, the vibrating particles system (vps) algorithm, is presented. the vps is a population-based algorithm which simulates a free vibration of single degree of freedom systems with viscous damping. the particles gradually approach to their equilibrium positions that are achieved from current population and historically b...

optimal design of cantilever reinforced concrete retaining wall can lead considerable cost saving if its involvement in hill road formation and railway line formation is significant.  a study of weight reduction optimization of reinforced cantilever retaining wall subjected to a sloped backfill using differential evolution algorithm (dea) is carried out in the present research.  the retaining w...

Beginning  in  2011  an  international  academic  contest  named  as  International  Student Competition  in  Structural  Optimization  (ISCSO)  has  been  organized  by  the  authors  to encourage undergraduate and graduate students to solve structural engineering optimization&nbs...

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...

in this work an improved method for designing a linear vibrational absorber, excited by random vibrations is presented and analyzed. first, analytical expressions, for non-stationary white noise accelerations, are derived. the criterion is different from the conventional criteria, used for structural design under random vibration, and it is based on minimum displacement or acceleration response...