Pressure Vessel Design Using the Dynamic Self-adaptive Harmony Search Algorithm

Solving constrained engineering problems using metaheuristic algorithms is now a common trend whereby finding optimal solutions for such problems is regarded of high value in many industrial and engineering processes. The dynamic self-adaptive harmony search (DSHS) algorithm was proposed recently by the first author to solve some continuous and constrained problems having continuous value variables. The main merit of DSHS is its ability to dynamically set the optimization parameters based on a quality measure that is computed in every optimization cycle. Solving constrained problems is considered much harder because feasible solutions are difficult to find due to the shrunk feasible search space defined by a constrained problem. In this paper, one of the most common benchmarking constrained chemical engineering problems; namely pressure vessel design, is considered. This problem is characterized by having discrete value variables in addition to continuous value ones. A modified DSHS algorithm is proposed to handle both types of variables utilizing a simple penalty function. The proposed approach gave results that are on par with other recent metaheuristic methods addressing the same benchmarking problem.