Particle Swarm Optimization for The Design of Trusses

Particle swarm optimization (PSO) is applied to the low-weight design of trusses. The objective function considered is the total weight (or cost) of the structure subjected to stress and displacement constraints. Traditionally, PSO has been applied to unconstrained problems; in this application, a hybrid PSO procedure incorporates a penalty function to account for stress and displacement constraints. In addition, the hybrid PSO procedure includes a search space reduction strategy that attempts to focus the search in the near-vicinity of the best solution found. The effectiveness of the hybrid PSO design procedure is demonstrated with several examples and compared with other classical optimization methods.