Evolutionary methods for the optimisation of engineering systems

The use of evolutionary methods for the optimisation of engineering systems is reviewed and a number of the most common methods are compared in terms of their philosophical basis and implementation. The use of these approaches, including genetic algorithms, evolutionary programming, evolutionary strategies, simulated annealing and population-based incremental learning, are illustrated using the shape optimisation problem of a steel plate with buckling and stress constraints. The solutions obtained using the various methods are compared