ABSTRACT
The main goal of an engineer is to design the best possible system. This is not an easy goal, since engineering systems are typically complex, involving multiple components and multiple failure modes, and their performance is time variant. Traditionally, structural designers used their intuition and experience to achieve their
main goal. However, in 1960 the foundation of a new discipline called structural optimization was introduced by Schmit [5]. In general, the formulation of a structural optimization problem requires (1) an objective function, also called a cost function, that needs to be optimized (i.e., minimized or maximized), (2) a set of design variables whose values at the optimum need to be identified, and (3) a set of constraints to be satisfied. Design optimization is a formal, computer-oriented approach to solve the above formulation [6].
