Optimum Design of Structures by an Improved Particle Swarm Algorithm

In the present study, an efficient optimization algorithm is proposed to optimal design of structures. The proposed algorithm is an improved particle swarm optimization (PSO) which its global search performance is enhanced by employing the concept of cellular automata (CA). In the so-called improved particle swarm optimization (IPSO) algorithm a new cellular automata based term is added to the conventional velocity equation. Also, the real-values of design variables are used and the artificial evolution is evolved on a small dimensioned grid. To show the computational advantages of the IPSO two numerical examples are presented. Using the new IPSO, not only the algorithm converges to a better solution but also the number of structural analyses is significantly reduced compared with the other existing variants of PSO algorithm