Effective reformulations of the truss topology design problem

Abstract

We present a new formulation of the truss topology problem that results in unique design and unique displacements of the optimal truss. This is reached by adding an upper level to the original optimization problem and formulating the new problem as an MPCC (Mathematical Program with Complementarity Constraints). We derive optimality conditions for this problem and present several techniques for its numerical solution. Finally, we compare two of these techniques on a series of numerical examples.