Solving structural engineering design optimization problems using an artificial bee colony algorithm

The main goal of the present paper is to solve structural engineering design optimization problems with nonlinear resource constraints. Real world problems in engineering domain are generally large scale or nonlinear or constrained optimization problems. Since heuristic methods are powerful than the traditional numerical methods, as they don't requires the derivatives of the functions and provides near to the global solution. Hence, in this article, a penalty guided artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm is presented to search the optimal solution of the problem in the feasible region of the entire search space. Numerical results of the structural design optimization problems are reported and compared. As shown, the solutions by the proposed approach are all superior to those best solutions by typical approaches in the literature. Also we can say, our results indicate that the proposed approach may yield better solutions to engineering problems than those obtained using current algorithms.