Efficient optimisation of structures using tabu search
This is an incremental improvement for structural engineering, offering a metaheuristic approach to optimize structures like trusses.
The paper tackled structural optimization problems using a Tabu search method, achieving results comparable to other numerical optimization approaches, as demonstrated on the ten bar truss problem with examples minimizing mass and handling multiple objectives via game theory.
This paper presents a novel approach to the optimisation of structures using a Tabu search (TS) method. TS is a metaheuristic which is used to guide local search methods towards a globally optimal solution by using flexible memory cycles of differing time spans. Results are presented for the well established ten bar truss problem and compared to results published in the literature. In the first example a truss is optimised to minimise mass and the results compared to results obtained using an alternative TS implementation. In the second example, the problem has multiple objectives that are compounded into a single objective function value using game theory. In general the results demonstrate that the TS method is capable of solving structural optimisation problems at least as efficiently as other numerical optimisation approaches.