Observer-Teacher-Learner-Based Optimization: An enhanced meta-heuristic for structural sizing design

Structural sizing is a rewarding task due to its non-convex constrained nature in the design space. In order to provide both global exploration and proper search refinement, a hybrid method is developed here based on outstanding features of Evolutionary Computing and Teaching-Learning-Based Optimization. The new method introduces an observer phase for memory exploitation in addition to vector-sum movements in the original teacher and learner phases. Proper integer coding is suited and applied for structural size optimization together with a fly-to-boundary technique and an elitism strategy. Performance of the proposed method is further evaluated treating a number of truss examples compared with teaching-learning-based optimization. The results show enhanced capability of the method in efficient and stable convergence toward the optimum and effective capturing of high quality solutions in discrete structural sizing problems.