A mixed variable evolutionary programming for optimisation of mechanical design

This paper presents a mixed-variable evolutionary programming (MVEP) for so lving mechanical design optimisation problems which contain integer, discre te, zero-one and continuous variables. The MVEP provides an improvement in both global search in a mixed-variable space and convergence performance in the optimisation process. An approach to handle various kinds of variables and constraints is discussed. Mutation operations of different variables a re introduced. The MVEP is evaluated in three examples of the mechanical de sign optimisation problem, which demonstrate that the proposed algorithm is able to find a better solution than that obtained from the existing method s.