The evolutionary structural optimization (ESO) method evolves a structure from the full design domain towards an optimum by gradually removing inefficient material. The bi-directional ESO (BESO) may start from any initial design and evolve a structure to an optimum by adding and removing material simultaneously. In this paper, a detailed comparison between ESO and BESO has been carried out for stiffness optimization problems. Both 2D and 3D examples shows that the BESO method possesses many advantages over the ESO method such as computational efficiency, robustness of the method and manufacturability of the final topology.
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