Advances in Engineering Software - Special issue on design optimization
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The paper presents the Mixed-Integer Non-linear Programming optimization approach (MINLP) to structural optimization. The MINLP is a combined continuous/discrete optimization technique, where a structural topology, discrete materials and standard sizes are optimized simultaneously with the continuous parameters (e.g. costs, mass). The MINLP optimization is performed through three steps: i.e. the generation of a mechanical superstructure, the modelling of an MINLP model formulation and the solution of the defined MINLP problem. The Modified Outer-Approximation/Equality-Relaxation (OA/ER) algorithm and a two-phase MINLP strategy are applied. The optimization is performed by a user-friendly version of the MINLP computer package MIPSYN. Two examples are presented at the end of the paper.