Improving the Gridshells’ Regularity by Using Evolutionary Techniques

Abstract

Designing and optimizing gridshell structures have been very attractive problems in the last decades. In this work, two indexes are introduced as “length ratio” and “shape ratio” to measure the regularity of a gridshell and are compared to the existing indexes in the literature. Two evolutionary techniques, genetic algorithm (GA) and particle swarm optimization (PSO) method, are utilized to improve the gridshells’ regularity by using the indexes. An approach is presented to generate the initial gridshells for a given surface in MATLAB. The two methods are implemented in MATLAB and compared on three benchmarks with different Gaussian curvatures. For each grid, both triangular and quadrangular meshes are generated. Experimental results show that the regularity of some gridshell is improved more than 50%, the regularity of quadrangular gridshells can be improved more than the regularity of triangular gridshells on the same surfaces, and there may be some relationship between Gaussian curvature of a surface and the improvement percentage of generated gridshells on it. Moreover, it is seen that PSO technique outperforms GA technique slightly in almost all the considered test problems. Finally, the Dolan–Moré performance profile is produced to compare the two methods according to running times.

Keywords

• gridshell structures
• shape ratio
• length ratio
• regularity
• particle swarm optimization
• genetic algorithm