Improved Ant Colony Algorithm And Its Application In Truss Structure Optimization

The structure optimization design is to optimize the design variables to make objective function have a maximum value or minimum value under the condition of meeting corresponding constraints,such as to make the structure own a lightest weight or a minimum cost or stiffness maximization besides the result also need to meet the requirements of corresponding standard.In view of the truss structure has the advantages of light weight and high stiffness and the materials can be recycle used and a good anti-seismic performance,therefore the application range of truss structure is slowly becoming wide and gradually becoming one of the widest using range structure style.Therefore making some research about truss optimization has a great significance.Because the current building structure is becoming more and more complex,the traditional structure optimization methods have can’t satisfy the need of practical engineering in solving precision and convergence speed and so on,therefore the emerging intelligent optimization algorithms have started to be used in structure optimization and obtain a good result.Ant colony algorithm as a kind of classic heuristic intelligent optimization algorithm has the advantages of strong robustness,distributing parallel computation and positive feedback,so after it being put forward,it is used in many fields,but at the same time the ant colony algorithm also have the disadvantages of convergence time is too long and easily fall into stagnation.Aiming at the shortcomings of ant colony algorithm,this paper puts forward the corresponding improvement measures,and make it applied to truss structure section size optimization,and obtained a good optimization results.The improved ant colony algorithm proposed in this paper mainly include the following two aspects of improvement.First of all,making a improvement about the initial path pheromone distribution in early searching period,and that can improve the local search ability of ant colony algorithm,and improve the searching precision of the algorithm;Secondly,the improved measures also include making use to the the optimal solution of public path that the algorithm has find,and that can improve the convergence speed of the algorithm and reduce the optimization time that algorithm need,and then,the improved ant colony algorithm was applied to several typicalsection size optimization of truss structures,in order to meet the need of practical engineering,the sectional areal is discrete variables.Finally,through the comparison of the results with other optimization algorithms,proved the feasibility of the improved algorithm in this paper.Therefore,putting forward a practical and effective optimization method,that can be conducted in the practical engineering application,at the same time can reduce the waste of resources are the topics of the research significance.