A Quantitative Comparison Between Size, Shape, Topology and Simultaneous Optimization for Truss Structures

There are typically three broad categories of structural optimization namely size, shape and topology. Over the past few decades various researchers have focused on developing techniques for optimizing structures by considering either one or a combination of these aspects. In this paper the efficiency of these techniques are investigated in an effort to quantify the improvement of the result obtained by utilizing a more complex optimization routine. The percentage of the structural weight saved and computational effort required are used as measures to compare these techniques. The well-known genetic algorithm with elitism is used to perform these tests on various benchmark structures found in literature. Some of the results that are obtained include that a simultaneous approach produces, on average, a 22 % better solution than a simple size optimization and a 12 % improvement when compared to a staged approach where the size, shape and topology of the structure is considered sequentially. From these results, it is concluded that a significant saving can be made by using a more complex optimization routine, such as a simultaneous approach.