Optimal design of truss structures by rescaled simulated annealing

Rescaled Simulated Annealing (RSA) has been adapted to solve combinatorial optimization problems in which the available computational resources are limited. Simulated Annealing (SA) is one of the most popular combinatorial optimization algorithms because of its convenience of use and because of the good asymptotic results of convergence to optimal solutions. However, SA is too slow to converge in many problems. RSA was introduced by extending the Metropolis procedure in SA. The extension rescales the state's energy candidate for a transition before applying the Metropolis criterion. The rescaling process accelerates convergence to the optimal solutions by reducing transitions from high energy local minima. In this paper, structural optimization examples using RSA are provided. Truss structures of which design variables are discrete or continuous are optimized with stress and displacement constraints. The optimization results by RSA are compared with the results from classical SA. The comparison shows that the numbers of optimization iterations can be effectively reduced using RSA.