TunnedTTStochastic Directional Search: an Efficient Heuristic for Structural Optimization of Building Frames

Abstract

Performance of an optimization heuristic highly depends to the method it employs to represent and decompose the search space. A class of optimization methods including swarm intelligence utilize an especial way of decomposing the search space via specified direction states. The present work expands the idea providing a stochastic directional state search with tuned thresholds for selecting every direction state. The proposed meta-heuristic is then utilized for the problem of structural weight minimization in building frames under lateral and gravitational loading using a finite element analyzer. Treating a number of examples from literature, efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed method is shown superior to some other meta-heuristics including an improved particle swarm optimizer