Date of Award

Spring 2006

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science (MS)

Department

Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering

Program/Concentration

Aerospace Engineering

Committee Director

Oktay Baysal

Committee Member

Osama Kandil

Committee Member

Gene Hou

Call Number for Print

Special Collections; LD4331.E535 P44 2006

Abstract

As a stochastic search method, evolutionary algorithm (EA) is an emergent optimization algorithm mimicking the natural evolution, where a "biological population" evolves over generations to adapt to an environment by selection, recombination, and mutation. When EA is applied to optimization problems, fitness, individual, and genes usually correspond to an objective function value, a design candidate, and design variables, respectively.

One of the key features of EA is that they search from multiple points in design space, instead of moving from a single point as in gradient-based methods. Furthermore, EA works on function evaluations alone and does not require derivatives or gradients of the objective function. These features lead to the advantages such as robustness, suitability to parallel computing, and simplicity in coupling analysis codes for fitness evaluation. Owing to these advantages, EA has become increasingly popular for a broad class of design problems.

On the other hand, the main disadvantage of EA is the substantial lack of computational efficiency due to the need for a large number of objective function evaluations, and hence the need to repeatedly solve the analysis equations. However, there are ways to improve the performance of EA. Among these efficiency improvement methods are multi-processing, improved genetic operators, and hybridization of EA with other intelligent system methods, such as, artificial intelligence or fuzzy computing.

Rights

In Copyright. URI: http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s).

DOI

10.25777/4391-5e64

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