Implementation of modified artificial bee colony (ABC) optimization technique for minimum cost design of welded structures

Abstract

Welded structures are widely used in many engineering load carrying structures such as columns, towers for wind turbine or water tanks, offshore and submarine structures, girders, stiffened doors, etc. welding is a costly fabrication process and proper sequence and welding process effect the cost of a huge structure. Keeping this in view two different problems from the literature for the cost optimization of welded structures are considered in this paper. The optimization procedure is carried out using artificial bee colony (ABC) optimization technique. Classical ABC is modified to increase the convergence rate of the original algorithm. Comparison of both the variants is experimented on many bench mark examples from the literature and also on two cost optimization problems of welded structures. The results of the considered techniques are compared with the previously published results. The considered techniques have given much better results in comparison to the previously tried approaches and also modified ABC has shown superiority over classical ABC.