Genetic programming-based approach for structural optimization

The main purpose of this paper is to introduce genetic programming into civil engineering problem solving. This paper describes a genetic programming-based approach for simultaneous sizing, geometry, and topology optimization of structures. An encoding strategy is presented to map between the real structures and the genetic programming parse trees. Numerical results for two examples reveal that the proposed approach is capable of producing the topology and shape of the desired trusses and the sizing of all the structural components. Hence, this approach can potentially be a powerful search and optimization technique in civil engineering problem solving.