We develop an optimization method for constructing investment portfolios that dominate a given benchmark portfolio in terms of third-degree stochastic dominance. Our approach relies on the properties of the semivariance function, a refinement of an existing ‘super-convex’ dominance condition and quadratic constrained programming. We apply our method to historical stock market data using an indu...

The failure probability of the structures is one of the challenging problems in structural engineering. To obtain the reliability index introduced by Hasofer and Lind, one needs to solve a nonlinear equality constrained optimization problem. In this study, four of the most recent metaheuristic algorithms are utilized for finding the design point and the failure probability of problems with cont...

This study has been inspired by the paper "An efficient 3D topology optimization code written in MATLAB” written by Liu and Tovar (2014) demonstrating that SIMP-based three-dimensional (3D) topology optimization of continuum structures can be implemented in 169 lines of MATLAB code. Based on the above paper, we show here that, by simple and easy-to-understand modificati...

In blackbox optimization, evaluation of the objective and constraint functions is time consuming. some situations, values may be evaluated independently or sequentially. The present work proposes compares two strategies to define a hierarchical ordering constraints interrupt process at trial point when it detected that will not improve current best solution. Numerical experiments are performed ...