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Civil-Comp Proceedings
ISSN 1759-3433
CCP: 88
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NINTH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON COMPUTATIONAL STRUCTURES TECHNOLOGY
Edited by: B.H.V. Topping and M. Papadrakakis
Paper 110

Structural Optimization Using a Stochastic Method

W. Elalem1,2, A. El Hami2 and R. Ellaia1

1Laboratory of Study and Research in Mathematics Applied, Mohammed V University - Engineering Mohammedia School, Rabat, Morocco
2Laboratory of Mecanics of Rouen, National Institute for Applied Sciences - Rouen, St Etienne du Rouvray, France

Full Bibliographic Reference for this paper
W. Elalem, A. El Hami, R. Ellaia, "Structural Optimization Using a Stochastic Method", in B.H.V. Topping, M. Papadrakakis, (Editors), "Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Computational Structures Technology", Civil-Comp Press, Stirlingshire, UK, Paper 110, 2008. doi:10.4203/ccp.88.110
Keywords: finite element analysis, topology optimization, structural analysis, stochastic optimization.

Summary
The growing interest in optimization reflects a realization of the effectiveness of numerical techniques for improving several filed including structural engineering. The present paper focus on the improvement of the efficiency of structural optimization, this includes the utilization of high performance finite element solvers as well as the coupling of robust optimization methods. The main goal of this paper is to investigate the use of the simultaneous perturbation stochastic approximation (SPSA) method in structural design optimization. SPSA can be used to handle complex large scale design problems. Since it, only, needs two evaluations of the objective function regardless of the dimensions of the design space corresponding to the optimization problem. An introduction into the mathematical optimization theory as well as a background of the method are presented and the algorithm of the method is described. A section of the paper is devoted to numerical examples results and discussion. The proposed method is applicable for any problem where the topology of the structure is not fixed, it is simple and capable of handing problems subject to any number of constraints which are not necessarily linear. The numerical results demonstrate the robustness and high performance of the proposed method for structural optimization.

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