Plastic Analysis of Frames Using Genetic and Ant Colony Algorithms

In the recent years heuristic algorithms such as genetic algorithms, ant colony algorithmsand simulated annealing have found many applications in optimization problems. Theessence of these algorithms lies in the fact that they do not depend on the specific search space to which they are applied and consequently this extends their generality. In this paper, genetic and ant colony algorithms are used to find the collapse load factor of twodimensional frames and their efficiency is compared to a direct approach. It is shown that when these algorithms are tuned finely and their parameters are adjusted carefully, very good results can be obtained. Four examples are presented to illustrate the efficiency of algorithms.