A. Ghazi - Department of Civil Engineering, School of Engineering, Shiraz University, Shiraz, Iran.
M. R. Banan, - Department of Civil Engineering, School of Engineering, Shiraz University, Shiraz, Iran.
M. Ashrafizaadeh - Department of Mechanical Engineering, Isfahan University of Technology, Isfahan, Iran.

Genetic Algorithms have been successfully employed for design of truss structures with minimum weight. This paper proposed a parallel GA for optimum design of space truss structures by considering size, topology, and shape variables. The applied mapping for decoding a binary string to the corresponding finite element model is described. The methodology uses the penalty method for constraints to be met. Flowchart of the parallel GA as a synchronous master-slave algorithm is presented. Two illustrative examples are also used to investigate the performance of the proposed algorithm as compared to literature.

Structural optimization, layout optimization, parallel processing, genetic algorithm