Design optimization of tall steel buildings by a modified particle swarm algorithm

Optimal design of tall buildings, as large‐scale structures, is a rather difficult task. To efficiently achieve this task, the computational performance of the employed standard meta‐heuristic algorithms needs to be improved. One of the most popular meta‐heuristics is particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm. The main aim of the present study is to propose a modified PSO (MPSO) algorithm for optimization of tall steel buildings. In order to achieve this purpose, PSO is sequentially utilized in a multi‐stage scheme where in each stage an initial swarm is generated on the basis of the information derived from the results of previous stages. Two large‐scale examples are presented to investigate the efficiency of the proposed MPSO. The numerical results demonstrate the computational advantages of the MPSO algorithm. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.