구조최적화를 위한 병렬유전자 알고리즘

Parallel Genetic Algorithm for Structural Optimization on a Cluster of Personal Computers

One of the drawbacks of GA-based structural optimization is that the fitness evaluation of a population of hundreds of individuals requiring hundreds of structural analyses at each CA generation is computational too expensive. Therefore, a parallel genetic algorithm is developed for structural optimization on a cluster of personal computers in this paper. Based on the parallel genetic algorithm, a population at every generation is partitioned into a number of sub-populations equal to the number of slave computers. Parallelism is exploited at sub-population level by allocationg each sub-population to a slave computer. Thus, fitness of a population at each generation can be concurrently evaluated on a cluster of personal computers. For implementation of the algorithm a virtual distributed computing system in a collection of personal computers connected via a 100 Mb/s Ethernet LAN. The algorithm is applied to the minimum weight design of a steel structure. The results show that the computational time requied for serial GA-based structural optimization process is drastically reduced.