Mechanical design optimization by mixed-variable evolutionary programming

This paper presents a mixed-variable evolutionary programming (MVEP) for solving mechanical design optimization problems which contain integer, discrete, zero-one and continuous variables. The MVEP provides an improvement in global search and convergence performance in a mixed-variable space. An approach to handle various kinds of variables and constraints is discussed. Two examples of mechanical design optimization are tested, which demonstrate that the proposed approach is superior to current methods for finding optimum solution, both in the quality of solution and convergence performance.