Optimum design of aluminum truss systems with to meta-heuristic optimization techniques

The objective of this thesis is to study advantage of aluminum truss in comparison with steel truss in terms of weight. In order to achieve this objective, algorithms, which are employed to optimize steel and aluminum trusses to perform minimum weight design, are developed. In this algorithms, metaheuristic optimization methods, artificial bee colony (ABC), brainstorming optimization (BSO) and biogeography based optimization (BBO) methods, which are successfully employed in civil engineering problems, are used. Aluminum and steel sections used in the truss optimization problem are defined as a design variable. Sections used in this problem was obtained from the design codes. Due to this reason, the design variables are defined separately. Boundary conditions of the optimization problem, stress, slenderness, and displacement, are obtained from ASD 89 and AA ASD 2000. As four different aluminum and steel truss example, they are designed by using these developed algorithms for minimum weight optimization. Three of these examples were optimized by using different optimization methods on a prior research. One example belongs to the researcher, and this was built in ANFAS Fair at Antalya, Turkey. Findings acquired from studies were compared with literature and the example built. According to results, using aluminum effectively contributes to decreasing weight and methods used in this studies perform properly.