Optimum plastic analysis of planar frames using ant colony system and charged system search algorithms

In the method of a combination of elementary mechanisms utilized in the plastic analysis of frame structures, a search is carried out to find the collapse load factor of a frame by checking every possible combination of its elementary mechanisms. In this paper, the ant colony system and charged system search algorithms are employed to optimize the process of finding the collapse load factor of planar frames. The efficiency of these algorithms is compared through four numerical examples.