Welded steel beam design using particle swarm analysis

The paper looks at the design of welded steel beams for a typical structure which contains both primary and secondary beams. The underlying theory is fully explained. Also the stress limits and other constraints are defined using practical limits which are defined in Eurocodes. The derived method is only approximate and suitable for early design. In order to give a means of assessing the suitability of PSO for solving the chosen problem, some exact solu-tions are first calculated using exhaustive search. These are then used to show that a simple PSO approach gives unsat-isfactory results and that it is necessary instead to use a layered algorithm.