Stochastic directional search: An ecient heuristic for structural optimization of building frames

Performance of an optimization heuristic highly depends on the method itemploys to represent and decompose the search space. a class of optimization methods,including swarm intelligence, utilizes a special way of decomposing the search space viaspecied direction states. the present work expands the idea, providing a stochasticdirectional state search with tuned thresholds for selecting every direction state. theproposed meta-heuristic is then utilized for the problem of structural weight minimizationin building frames under lateral and gravitational loading using a nite element analyzer.treating a number of examples from the literature, the eciency and eectiveness of theproposed method are shown to be superior to some other meta-heuristics, including animproved particle swarm optimizer.