Optimum structural design of spatial truss structures via migration-based imperialist competitive algorithm

This paper presents a new hybrid algorithm generated by combining advantageous features of the Imperialist Competitive Algorithm (ICA) and Biogeography Based Optimization (BBO) to create an effective search technique. Although the ICA performs fairly well in the exploration phase, it is less effective in the exploitation stage. In addition, its convergence speed is problematic in some instances. Meanwhile, the BBO method's migration operator strongly emphasizes local search to focus on promising solutions and finds the optimum solution more precisely. The combination of these two algorithms leads to a robust hybrid algorithm that has both exploratory and exploitative functionalities. The proposed hybrid algorithm is named Migration-Based Imperialist Competitive Algorithm (MBICA). To validate its performance, MBICA is used to optimize a variety of benchmark truss structures. Compared to some other methods, this algorithm converges to better or at least identical solutions by reducing the number of structural analyses. Finally, the results of the standard BBO, ICA, and other recently developed metaheuristic optimization methods are compared with the results of this study.