An algorithm inspired by bee colonies coupled to an adaptive penalty method for truss structural optimization problems

Abstract

The constrained optimization problems are very common in the engineering field. For instance, in civil, aeronautical, mechanical engineering and so on, this type of problem is largely used to find the best designs of structures leading to a structural optimization problem to be solved. Commonly, these problems consist in to find structures with the minimum weight, subject to a set of constraints such as allowable stress, displacements, natural frequencies of vibration and stability criteria. Besides the traditional optimization methods, consolidated through the decades, the evolutionary algorithms, in general inspired by natural phenomenona, have been playing an important role showing robustness to solve this kind of problem. In 2005, the artificial bee colony algorithm (ABC), inspired by the foraging of bee colonies, was proposed to solve multimodal and multidimensional optimization problems. This paper proposes, analyzes and discusses the coupling of ABC to variants of an adaptive penalty method, handling the constraints, to solve traditional problems of truss structural optimization. The results obtained are compared with the literature showing that the proposed strategy can be efficient and competitive.