Author(s)

J. Cai & G. Thierauf

Abstract

A method for the solution of mixed-discrete structural optimization prob- lems based on a two level parallel evolution strategy is presented. On the first level, the optimization problem is divided into two subproblems with discrete and continuous design variables, respectively. The two subprob- lems are solved simultaneously on a parallel computing architecture. On the second level, each subproblem is further parallelized by means of a parallel sub-evolution-strategy. Periodically, the design variables in the two groups are exchanged. Examples are included to demonstrate the implementation of this method on a 8 nodes parallel computer. 1 Introduction Many problems in structural optimization involve not only continuous variables but also discrete ones. Discrete variables are used in many ways s

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