Until recently, scientists investigating structural problems were primarily concerned with finding efficient methods for discretizing the spatial component of the structure. Once they constructed an ODE matrix system with a spatial semidiscretization, they simply used standard ODE methods to time-step the system so as to approximate the structural dynamics. Unfortunately these standard ODE meth...

Structural optimization, when approached by conventional (gradient based) minimization algorithms presents several difficulties, mainly related to computational aspects for the huge number of nonlinear analyses required, that regard both Objective Functions (OFs) and Constraints. Moreover, from the early '80s to today's, Evolutionary Algorithms have been successfully developed and applied as a ...