A mixed variable evolutionary programming for optimisation of mechanical design

This paper presents a mixed-variable evolutionary programming (MVEP) for solving mechanical design optimisation problems which contain integer, discrete, zero-one and continuous variables. The MVEP provides an improvement in both global search in a mixed-variable space and convergence performance in the optimisation process. An approach to handle various kinds of variables and constraints is discussed. Mutation operations of different variables are introduced. The MVEP is evaluated in three examples of the mechanical design optimisation problem, which demonstrate that the proposed algorithm is able to find a better solution than that obtained from the existing methods.