Particle swarm optimizer, ant colony strategy and harmony search scheme hybridized for optimization of truss structures

A heuristic particle swarm ant colony optimization (HPSACO) is presented for optimum design of trusses. The algorithm is based on the particle swarm optimizer with passive congregation (PSOPC), ant colony optimization and harmony search scheme. HPSACO applies PSOPC for global optimization and the ant colony approach is used to update positions of particles to attain the feasible solution space. HPSACO handles the problem-specific constraints using a fly-back mechanism, and harmony search scheme deals with variable constraints. Results demonstrate the efficiency and robustness or HPSACO, which performs better than the other PSO-based algorithms having higher converges rate than PSO and PSOPC. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.