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Preface

This book is about the use of metaheuristic algorithms on two different but closely related subjects, namely structural design and structural analysis. Indeed, these subjects are different, but every engineer knows that structural design involves structural analysis, most of the time applied many times in order to finish the design.

Applications of metaheuristic algorithms on design problems began as early as the first appearance of these algorithms, in the second half of the 20th century. In these works, analysis of parts were being performed by using the well-known finite element method (FEM) or some other techniques. In the literature, we can find an important accumulation of such applications, predominantly in scientific media. Despite the abundance of these works, engineers are still far from using them extensively in practice. The studies are still at the academic level except for certain problems, like some structural parts or components and some simple trusses.

The existence of FEM enabled engineers to easily and accurately analyze the behavior of common structures in a very large domain. But for some uncommon problems involving nonlinearities and discontinuities, the elegant FEM ceases to be sufficient and efficient. The use of energy principles combined with basic concepts of FEM – recently referred to as the Finite Element Method with Energy Minimization (FEMEM) – is shown to be able to solve these special problems with the help of metaheuristic algorithms. The studies in this field are also still at a primitive level, and far from being available in practice.

Thus, it can be said that applications of metaheuristic algorithms are not sufficiently developed for engineers, either in design or in analysis. But in both fields, the trend is for great advances to be made continuously, in every corner of the world, so that the subject is a highly dynamic one, and the goal to be attained is still way ahead.

Writing a book on a subject that is ever advancing in many aspects is generally rather difficult to do. Such an undertaking requires a certain kind of encouragement; for this book, that encouragement was provided by Patrick Siarry from Paris-Est Créteil University, France. The authors also thank those at Wiley-ISTE who were very helpful during each step of the preparation of the book. Special thanks go to Emeritus Professor Fuat Erbatur from Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey, for introducing these algorithms to the authors back in 2000.

We hope that readers find this book to be a thorough evaluation of the state of the art for applications of metaheuristic algorithms in structural design and analysis.

Yusuf Cengiz TOKLU

Beykent University

Istanbul, Turkey

Gebrail BEKDAŞ

Istanbul University-Cerrahpaşa

Turkey

Sinan Melih NIGDELI

Istanbul University-Cerrahpaşa

Turkey

March 2021