Water cycle, mine blast and improved mine blast algorithms for discrete sizing optimization of truss structures

•WCA and MBA are inspired by water cycle process and explosion of landmines.•MBA is improved in terms of exploitation phase, so called improved MBA (IMBA).•IMBA, WCA, and MBA are utilized for solving discrete sizing optimization of trusses.•IMBA, WCA, and MBA outperformed other reported optimizers in terms of accuracy and computational effort.

This paper presents the applications of the mine blast algorithm (MBA) and the water cycle algorithm (WCA), in addition to an improved version of MBA for weight minimization of truss structures including discrete sizing variables. The MBA mimics the explosion of landmines, while the WCA is inspired by the observation of water cycle process. An improved version of MBA (IMBA), is also presented. The efficiency of the three optimization algorithms is tested using classical benchmark discrete truss design problems. Optimization results show that MBA, IMBA, and WCA offer a good degree of competitiveness against other state-of-the-art metaheuristic techniques.