Engineering Transactions, 44, 3-4, pp. 361-373, 1996

Minimum Weight Design of Trusses Using Heuristic Rules

M. Pyrz
Ecole Universitaire D’Ingenieurs de Lille, Laboratoire de Mecanique de Lille, Lille
France

The minimum weight design of truss structures, composed of elements chosen from catalogues of available profiles, is presented in the paper. A controlled enumeration method is supplied with a knowledge module, containing the problem-oriented information, and represented symbolically. Heuristic rules, proposed on the basis of static analysis of the structure, are used to eliminate all "non-promising" propositions without numerical checking for feasibility. This approach leads to a great reduction (with respect to the "standard" enumeration) in the number of variants that have to be verified to find the global optimum. The application of knowledge-based enumeration is illustrated by numerical examples of standard truss optimisation problems for one or several loading conditions.

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