Mechanical component design for multiple ojectives using elitist non-dominated sorting GA

Abstract

In this paper, we apply an elitist multi-objective genetic algorithm for solving mechanical component design problems with multiple objectives. Although there exists a number of classical techniques, evolutionary algorithms (EAs) have an edge over the classical methods in that they can find multiple Pareto-optimal solutions in one single simulation run. Recently, we proposed a much improved version of the originally proposed non-dominated sorting GA (we call NSGA-II) in that it is computationally faster, uses an elitist strategy, and it does not require fixing any niching parameter. In this paper, we use NSGA-II to handle constraints by using two implementations. On four mechanical component design problems borrowed from the literature, we show that the NSGA-II can find a much wider spread of solutions than classical methods and the NSGA. The results are encouraging and suggests immediate application of the proposed method to other more complex engineering design problems.