In this study, the newly developed Marine Predators Algorithm (MPA) is formulated to minimize the weight of truss structures. MPA is a swarm-based metaheuristic algorithm inspired by the efficient foraging strategies of marine predators in oceanic environments. In order to assess the robustness of the proposed method, three normal-sized structural benchmarks (10-bar, 60-bar, and 120-bar spatial dome) and three large-scale structures (272-bar, 942-bar, and 4666-bar truss tower) were selected from the literature. Results point to the inherent strength of MPA against all state-of-the-art metaheuristic optimizers implemented so far. Moreover, for the first time in the field, a quantitative evaluation and an answer to the age-old question of the proper convergence behavior (exploration vs. exploitation balance) in the context of structural optimization is conducted. Therefore, a novel dimension-wise diversity index is adopted as a methodology to investigate each of the two schemes. It was concluded that the balance that produced the best results was about 90% exploitation and 10% exploration (on average for the entire computational process).
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