MINIMUM WEIGHT DESIGN OF COLD-FORMED STEEL BEAMS 27

In addition to the above constraints, practical considerations may dictate some upper and lower bounds on
the design variables. For example, the thickness of a shape may be limited by the capacity of the forming
equipment. Generally, the thickness of commonly used members varies from 0.5 mm to 6.0 mm.

3.4
NEURAL DYNAMICS OPTIMIZATION MODEL
Adeli and Park (1998) present a general neural dynamics model for optimization problems that guarantees a
stable and local optimum solution. This solved one of the fundamental problems of using ANNs for
optimization: How to find a neural dynamics system for a particular optimization problem that would
produce a stable and local optimum solution. The neural dynamics optimization model is robust and
particularly effective for large and complex optimization problems.
The constrained optimization problem (Eqs. 3.13.3), can be written in the following reduced form by
combining Eqs. (3.2) and (3.3):
Minimize
(3.20)
subject to inequality constraints
(3.21)
where J is the total number of inequality constraints including side constraints represented by Eq. (3.3).
Using the exterior penalty function method, the constrained optimization problem can be written as an
unconstrained optimization problem as follows:

(3.22)

where and rn is the penalty parameter magnifying constraint violations.

A dynamic system is defined as a system of first order differential equations of the state variables:

(3.23)

where the vector represents the time evolution of node activations. A

solution to the system of equations is an equilibrium point of the system. In the theory of
nonlinear system dynamics, the Lyapunov stability theorem is used to determine the stability of the
equilibrium point. The theorem states that is stable if the time derivative of a functional, V, called the
Lyapunov functional (or energy functional), is negative semi-definite for all non-zero X, i.e. The
Lyapunov functional is defined as an analytic function of the system variables, V(X), such that
and for all (Kolk and Lerman, 1992).
In the design of cold-formed steel beams, each term Xi in the vector X represents a cross-sectional
dimension and is always greater than zero. Therefore, both the objective function and the penalized
constraint functions satisfy the conditions for a Lyapunov functional. As Eq. (3.22) is made of these two
terms it is therefore a valid Lyapunov functional.
Using the chain rule, we have

(3.24)