Engineering design optimization using species-conserving genetic algorithms.

Abstract

A species conservation technique takes inspiration from the field of ecology, in which the population is divided into several species according to their similarity. Based on this technique, a Species Conservation Genetic Algorithms (SCGA) was established and had been proved to be very effective in finding multiple solutions of multimodal optimisation problems, including some problems known to be deceptive for genetic algorithms (GAs). In this paper, the SCGA is introduced to engineering structure design, and two structure designs are used to demonstrate the performances of the SCGA and how the choice of a meaningful measure of similarity will help in exploration of significant designs.