• Journal of Korean Society of Steel Construction
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• v.18 no.2
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• pp.213-223
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• 2006

Conventional truss optimization approaches, while often sophisticated and computationally intensive, have been applied to simple, minimum weight-cost models. These approaches do not perform well when applied to real-world trusses, which have costmodels that are complex and which often involve multiple objectives. Thus, this paper describes the optimization strategies that a clustering technique, which identifies members that are likely to have the same product type, uses for the optimal design of truss structures with real- world cost functions that consider the costs on the weight of the truss, the number of products in the design, the number of joints in the structures, and the costs required in the site.At first, the clustering technique is applied to identify the members and to generate a proper initial solution. A simple taboo search technique is then used, which attempts to generate the optimal solution by starting with the solution from the previous technique. For example, the proposed approach is a plied to a typical problem and to a problem similar to relative performances. The results show that this algorithm generates not only better-quality solutions but also more efficient ones