TunnedTTStochastic Directional Search: an Efficient Heuristic for Structural Optimization of Building Frames

Authors

Department of Engineering, Kharazmi University, Tehran, Iran

Abstract

Performance of an optimization heuristic highly depends to the method it employs to represent and decompose the search space. A class of optimization methods including swarm intelligence utilize an especial way of decomposing the search space via specified direction states. The present work expands the idea providing a stochastic directional state search with tuned thresholds for selecting every direction state. The proposed meta-heuristic is then utilized for the problem of structural weight minimization in building frames under lateral and gravitational loading using a finite element analyzer. Treating a number of examples from literature, efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed method is shown superior to some other meta-heuristics including an improved particle swarm optimizer

Keywords