AN ENHANCED FIREFLY ALGORITHM FOR MIXED VARIABLE STRUCTURAL OPTIMIZATION PROBLEMS

Abstract

The recently developed firefly algorithm has become one of the prominent population-based metaheuristics due to its efficiency in solving a wide range of diverse real-world problems. In this paper an enhanced firefly algorithm to solve mixed variable structural optimization problems is presented. Two modifications related with the constraint handling method based on Deb's rules and the geometric progression reduction scheme mechanism are introduced in order to improve its performance in the constrained search space. The proposed algorithm is tested on four classical structural optimization problems taken from literature. The obtained results show that the proposed approach was very competitive in the considered problems, mostly outperforming the original firefly algorithm.