Performance evaluation of Particle Swarm Optimization and Solid Isotropic Material with Penalization in topology optimization

This paper presents a comparison between the Solid Isotropic Material with Penalization (SIMP) approach and the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) method in continuous structural topology optimization. SIMP is a mature gradient-based algorithm which has stable performance and fast convergence in various topology optimization applications. PSO is a relatively new evolutionary algorithm, inspired by the nature of bird flocking. Its applications to topology optimization are only reported in recent years. In this paper, the mechanisms of these two algorithms are introduced first. Their performances in continuous topology optimization are compared through an example. Through these comparisons, improvement directions of PSO in topology optimization are outlined.