Various structures, such as buildings, bridges, and paved roads play an important role in our lives. However, these construction projects require large expenditures. Designing infrastructure cost-efficiently while satisfying all necessary design constraints is one of the most important and difficult tasks for a structural engineer. Traditionally, mathematical gradient-based optimization techniques have been applied to these designs. However, these gradient-based methods are not suitable for discrete design variables such as factory-made cross sectional area of structural members. Recently, researchers have turned their interest to phenomenon-mimicking optimization techniques because these techniques have proved able to efficiently handle discrete design variables. One of these techniques is harmony search, an algorithm developed from musical improvisation that has been applied to various structural design problems and has demonstrated cost-savings. This book gathers all the latest developments relating to the application of the harmony search algorithm in the structural design field in order for readers to efficiently understand the full spectrum of the algorithm’s potential and to easily apply the algorithm to their own structural problems. This book contains six chapters with the following subjects: standard harmony search algorithm and its applications by Lee; standard harmony search algorithm for steel frame design by Degertekin; adaptive harmony search algorithm and its applications by Saka and Hasançebi; harmony particle swarm algorithm and its applications by Li and Liu; hybrid algorithm of harmony search, particle swarm & ant colony for structural design by Kaveh and Talatahari; and parameter calibration of viscoelastic and damage functions by Mun and Geem.

The Harmony Search Algorithm (HSA) is one of the most well-known techniques in the field of soft computing, an important paradigm in the science and engineering community. This volume, the proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Harmony Search Algorithm 2015 (ICHSA 2015), brings together contributions describing the latest developments in the field of soft computing with a special focus on HSA techniques. It includes coverage of new methods that have potentially immense application in various fields. Contributed articles cover aspects of the following topics related to the Harmony Search Algorithm: analytical studies; improved, hybrid and multi-objective variants; parameter tuning; and large-scale applications. The book also contains papers discussing recent advances on the following topics: genetic algorithms; evolutionary strategies; the firefly algorithm and cuckoo search; particle swarm optimization and ant colony optimization; simulated annealing; and local search techniques. This book offers a valuable snapshot of the current status of the Harmony Search Algorithm and related techniques, and will be a useful reference for practising researchers and advanced students in computer science and engineering.

Civil engineering structures such as buildings, bridges, stadiums, and offshore structures play an import role in our daily life. However, constructing these structures requires lots of budget. Thus, how to cost-efficiently design structures satisfying all required design constraints is an important factor to structural engineers. Traditionally, mathematical gradient-based optimal techniques have been applied to the design of optimal structures. While, many practical engineering optimal problems are very complex and hard to solve by traditional method. In the past few decades, swarm intelligence algorithms, which were inspired by the social behaviour of natural animals such as fish schooling and bird flocking, were developed because they do not require conventional mathematical assumptions and thus possess better global search abilities than the traditional optimization algorithms and have attracted more and more attention. These intelligent based algorithms are very suitable for continuous and discrete design variable problems such as ready-made structural members and have been vigorously applied to various structural design problems and obtained good results. This book gathers the authors’ latest research work related with particle swarm optimizer algorithm and group search optimizer algorithm as well as their application to structural optimal design. The readers can understand the full spectrum of the algorithms and apply the algorithms to their own research problems.

Calculus has been used in solving many scientific and engineering problems. For optimization problems, however, the differential calculus technique sometimes has a drawback when the objective function is step-wise, discontinuous, or multi-modal, or when decision variables are discrete rather than continuous. Thus, researchers have recently turned their interests into metaheuristic algorithms that have been inspired by natural phenomena such as evolution, animal behavior, or metallic annealing. This book especially focuses on a music-inspired metaheuristic algorithm, harmony search. Interestingly, there exists an analogy between music and optimization: each musical instrument corresponds to each decision variable; musical note corresponds to variable value; and harmony corresponds to solution vector. Just like musicians in Jazz improvisation play notes randomly or based on experiences in order to find fantastic harmony, variables in the harmony search algorithm have random values or previously-memorized good values in order to find optimal solution.

Softcomputing techniques play a vital role in the industry. This book presents several important papers presented by some of the well-known scientists from all over the globe. The main techniques of soft computing presented include ant-colony optimization, artificial immune systems, artificial neural networks, Bayesian models. The book includes various examples and application domains such as bioinformatics, detection of phishing attacks, and fault detection of motors.

Nowadays, music-inspired phenomenon-mimicking harmony search algorithm is fast growing with many applications. One of key success factors of the algorithm is the employment of a novel stochastic derivative which can be used even for discrete variables. Instead of traditional calculus-based gradient, the algorithm utilizes musician’s experience as a derivative in searching for an optimal solution. This can be a new paradigm and main reason in the successes of various applications. The goal of this book is to introduce major advances of the harmony search algorithm in recent years. The book contains 14 chapters with the following subjects: State-of-the-art in the harmony search algorithm structure; robotics (robot terrain and manipulator trajectory); visual tracking; web text data mining; power flow planning; fuzzy control system; hybridization (with Taguchi method or SQP method); groundwater management; irrigation ; logistics; timetabling; and bioinformatics (RNA structure prediction). This book collects the above-mentioned theory and applications, which are dispersed in various technical publications, so that readers can have a good grasp of current status of the harmony search algorithm and foster new breakthroughs in their fields using the algorithm.

This book engages in an ongoing topic, such as the implementation of nature-inspired metaheuristic algorithms, with a main concentration on optimization problems in different fields of engineering optimization applications. The chapters of the book provide concise overviews of various nature-inspired metaheuristic algorithms, defining their profits in obtaining the optimal solutions of tiresome engineering design problems that cannot be efficiently resolved via conventional mathematical-based techniques. Thus, the chapters report on advanced studies on the applications of not only the traditional, but also the contemporary certain nature-inspired metaheuristic algorithms to specific engineering optimization problems with single and multi-objectives. Harmony search, artificial bee colony, teaching learning-based optimization, electrostatic discharge, grasshopper, backtracking search, and interactive search are just some of the methods exhibited and consulted step by step in application contexts. The book is a perfect guide for graduate students, researchers, academicians, and professionals willing to use metaheuristic algorithms in engineering optimization applications.