Authors: Wei Wang Shijun Guo Nan Chang Feng Zhao Wei Yang
Publish Date: 2009/11/12
Volume: 41, Issue: 5, Pages: 711-720
Abstract
This paper presents a modified Ant Colony Algorithm ACA called multicitylayer ant colony algorithm MCLACA The research attention is focused on improving the computational efficiency in the stacking sequence optimisation of a laminated composite plate for maximum buckling load A new operator the socalled two point interchange is introduced and proved to be effective for reducing the convergence time and enhancing the robustness in the MCLACA performance The laminate optimisation is subject to balanced and symmetric layup with ply contiguous and strength constraints In order to assess the MCLACA performance a simply supported rectangular laminate plate which was taken as numerical example in previous research using traditional ACA and genetic algorithm GA is chosen as a benchmark case study Comparing with the ACA and GA results it is shown that the presented MCLACA has better performance in terms of computational efficiency and robustness To demonstrate the applicability of the MCLACA to a general case an additional example of laminate optimisation has been taken with more design variables and five different boundary conditions by finite element analysis
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