A Genetic and a Greedy-Genetic Algorithm for Steady-State Disturbance Compensability Actuator Placement for Adaptive Structures

Adaptive structures allow for ultra-lightweight construction of civil buildings and thereby offer great potential to decrease the resource consumption of the construction sector. The design of such structures includes placing actuators. One approach is solving an optimization problem based on steady-state disturbance compensability. To solve this kind of optimization problems, greedy algorithms are a common choice and may find globally optimal solutions for specific optimization problems. Regarding the optimization problem considered in this paper, the greedy solutions are presumably good, however there are no guarantees that it finds globally optimal solutions. Therefore we apply a genetic algorithm and an algorithm that combines a greedy and a genetic algorithm. The algorithms are compared in a simulation study. The greedy-genetic algorithm has advantages over the other algorithms (in terms of the quality function values achieved as well as symmetry aspects of the solution actuator configurations). However, the other algorithms achieve similar quality function values, which strengthens the previously mentioned conjecture that the greedy algorithm performs well.