Evolutionary programming for inverse problems in civil engineering

Two main contributions to evolutionary computation and their applications a re reported in this paper: (1) a new evolutionary programming (EP) algorith m is proposed with several improved techniques added to the conventional EP algorithm; and (2) the improved EP algorithm is incorporated with the fini te-element method (FEM) to form an integrated algorithm, called FEMEP, for solving the inverse problems in civil and structural engineering. in the im proved EP algorithm, two types of mutation-namely, random and uniform-are p roposed to increase the efficiency and to retain the versatility of the con ventional EP algorithm. Simulated annealing is adopted to prevent the chrom osomes in the early generations from stagnating in a local optima. The algo rithm is examined with two typical numerical examples. Results show that th e improved EP algorithm is efficient and versatile, it is able to find bett er solutions than genetic algorithms and other evolution programs. The FEME P algorithm is then applied to the inverse problems, with two parameter ide ntification problems as illustrations. Although simple, they demonstrated t he potency of the proposed integrated algorithm to solve inverse problems i n civil and structural engineering.