Optimum design of plates and shells using the DCOC method

The DCOC method developed recently by Zhou and Rozvany (1992, 1993) has been shown to highly improve the efficiency of optimality criteria methods. In the present paper, the application of this method to plates and shells is discussed. High efficiency of DCOC is guaranteed by the fact that the computational expense of DCOC is only influenced by the number of active displacement constraints, which is usually very small for the considered problem.