Modified differential evolution for tension/Compression string design problem

This paper introduces a modified differential evoluiton method to solve the tension/compression string design problem. The modification is derived from mechanisms of social networks. In the proposed method, each individual will be attracted by the knowed best individual following the connectivity between each other. The connectivity is calculated based on the difference of the variables in each vector. The individuals with high connectivity tend to perform local search while those with poor connectivity tend to perform global search instead. The approach was employed for a tension/compression string design problem and by comparisons with the other evolutionary algorithms, the proposed method privided better resutls.