Plastic limit analysis of frames using ant colony systems

In recent years, heuristic algorithms such as simulated annealing, genetic and ant colony algorithms have found many applications in optimization problems. In this paper, ant colony systems (ACSs) are used to optimize the process of finding the collapse load factor of two-dimensional frames. Three variants of ACS algorithms are developed and their relative performances are compared. It is observed that if an ACS is finely tuned and its parameters are carefully adjusted, satisfactory results can be obtained.