Static Shape and Stress Control of Trusses with Optimum Time, Actuators and Actuation

Traditional shape and stress control of structures use many actuators and require enormous time to find reasonable solutions that need designers to input specific target displacement and stress. This study employs a linear technique to static shape and stress control of pin-jointed assemblies as a theoretical advancement to prior works and provides a comparative analysis against previously established works. The study evaluates the proposed method using MATLAB to find the optimum set of actuators, and MATLAB and SAP2000 to verify the actuation results obtained through applying the set of actuations to the numerical models. The proposed method minimizes the number of trials, count of actuators, and total actuation up to 83%, 73%, and 50%, respectively. Furthermore, the optimum solution could be found in a single trial. The study focuses on the three aspects: (a) finding the optimal count of actuators; (b) optimum amount of actuation using fmincon function; and c) Implementing two-sided inequalities to control equations allowing designers to develop target internal forces and nodal displacements, as domains rather than specific numbers. This improves the optimization process affecting actuator count, total actuation elements, and processing time