| Abstract: | A method to efficiently solve the problem of minimum weight design of plane and space trusses with discrete or mixed variables is developed. The method can also be applied to continuous variables. The original formulation leads to a non-linear constrained minimization problem with inequality constraints, which is solved by means of a sequence of approximate problems using dual techniques. In the dual space, the objective function is to be maximized, depends on continuous variables, is concave and has first and second order discontinuities. In addition, the constraints deal simply with restricting the dual variables to be non-negative. To solve the problem an ad hoc algorithm from mathematical programming has been adapted. Some examples have been developed to show the effectiveness of the method. |
