Prestress stability of pin-jointed assemblies using ant colony systems

Prestress stability is the key of whether a pin-jointed assembly could be transformed into a tensegrity structure. This study developed an optimization model to investigate the prestress stability of pin-jointed assemblies. The continuous optimization problem was converted into a modified traveling salesman problem (TSP), and the ant colony system (ACS) was used to search for feasible solutions. Coefficients for the independent states of self-stress were taken as different cities in the network. Several typical examples were tested. It could be concluded that the proposed technique is efficient, and applicable to both planar and three-dimensional complex pin-jointed assemblies.