Dynamic selective pressure using hybrid evolutionary and ant system strategies for structural optimization

Genetic algorithms have already been applied to various fields of engineering problems as a general optimization tool in charge of expensive sampling of the coded design space. In order to reduce such a computational cost in practice, application of evolutionary strategies is growing rapidly in the adaptive use of problem-specific information. This paper proposes a hybrid strategy to utilize a cooperative dynamic memory of more competitive solutions combining indirect information share in ant systems with direct constructive genetic search. Some proper coding techniques are employed to enable testing the method with various sets of control parameters. As a challenging field of interest, its application to structural layout optimization is considered while an example of a traveling salesman problem is also treated as a combinatorial benchmark. Copyright q 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd