Evolutionary Seeding of Diverse Structural Design Solutions via Topology Optimization

Topology optimization is a powerful design tool in structural engineering and other engineering problems. The design domain is discretized into elements, and a finite element method model is iteratively solved to find the element that maximizes the structure's performance. Although gradient-based solvers have been used to solve topology optimization problems, they may be susceptible to suboptimal solutions or difficulty obtaining feasible solutions, particularly in non-convex optimization problems. The presence of non-convexities can hinder convergence, leading to challenges in achieving the global optimum. With this in mind, we discuss in this paper the application of the quality diversity approach to topological optimization problems. Quality diversity (QD) algorithms have shown promise in the research field of optimization and have many applications in engineering design, robotics, and games. MAP-Elites is a popular QD algorithm used in robotics. In soft robotics, the MAP-Elites algorithm has been used to optimize the shape and control of soft robots, leading to the discovery of new and efficient motion strategies. This paper introduces an approach based on MAP-Elites to provide diverse designs for structural optimization problems. Three fundamental topology optimization problems are used for experimental testing, and the results demonstrate the ability of the proposed algorithm to generate diverse, high-performance designs for those problems. Furthermore, the proposed algorithm can be a valuable engineering design tool capable of creating novel and efficient designs.