Impact of the material distribution formalism on the efficiency of evolutionary methods for topology optimization

Abstract

We consider an evolutionary method applied to a topology optimization problem. We compare two material distribution formalisms (static vs. Voronoibased dynamic), and two sets of reproduction mechanisms (standard vs. topologyadapted). We test those four variants on both theoretical and practical test cases, to show that the Voronoi-based formalism combined with adapted reproduction mechanisms performs better and is less sensitive to its parameters. © 2010 Springer -Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.