A hybrid imperialist competitive ant colony algorithm for optimum geometry design of frame structures

This paper describes new optimization strategy that offers significant improvements in performance over existing methods for geometry design of frame structures. In this study, an imperialist competitive algorithm (ICA) and ant colony optimization (ACO) are combined to reach to an efficient algorithm, called Imperialist Competitive Ant Colony Optimization (ICACO). The ICACO applies the ICA for global optimization and the ACO for local search. The results of optimal geometry for three benchmark examples of frame structures, demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the new method presented in this work. The results indicate that the new technique has a powerful search strategies due to the modifications made in search module of ICACO. Higher rate of convergence is the superiority of the presented algorithm in comparison with the conventional mathematical methods and non hybrid heuristic methods such as ICA and particle swarm optimization (PSO).

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