The present trend in industries is to improve the techniques currently used in design and manufacture of products in order to meet the challenges of the competitive market. The crucial task nowadays is to find the optimal design and machining parameters so as to minimize the production costs. Design optimization involves more numbers of design variables with multiple and conflicting objectives, subjected to complex nonlinear constraints. The complexity of optimal design of machine elements creates the requirement for increasingly effective algorithms. Solving a nonlinear multiobjective optimization problem requires significant computing effort. From the literature it is evident that metaheuristic algorithms are performing better in dealing with multiobjective optimization. In this paper, we extend the recently developed parameter adaptive harmony search algorithm to solve multiobjective design optimization problems using the weighted sum approach. To determine the best weightage set for this analysis, a performance index based on least average error is used to determine the index of each weightage set. The proposed approach is applied to solve a biobjective design optimization of disc brake problem and a newly formulated biobjective design optimization of helical spring problem. The results reveal that the proposed approach is performing better than other algorithms.

Mechanical design engineers design products by selecting the best possible materials and geometries that satisfies the specific operational requirements of the design. It involves lot of creativity and aesthetics to make better designs. A gear design makes the designer to compromise many design variables so as to arrive the best performance of a gear set. The best possible way for multi variable, Multiobjective gear design is to try design optimization. For many complex engineering optimization problems multi objective design optimization methods are used to simplify the design problem. In this paper, multiobjective design of helical gear pair transmission with objective functions namely volume of the small and large helical gear and opposite number of overlap ratio is taken into account. The design variables considered are normal module, helix angle, gear width coefficient and teeth number of small helical gear. A recent meta-heuristic algorithm namely parameter adaptive harmony search algorithm is applied to solve this problem using the weighted sum approach. It is evident from the results that the proposed approach is performing better than other algorithms.

Arriving optimal solutions is one of the important tasks in engineering design. Many real-world design optimization problems involve multiple conflicting objectives. The design variables are of continuous or discrete in nature. In general, for solving Multi Objective Optimization methods weight method is preferred. In this method, all the objective functions are converted into a single objective function by assigning suitable weights to each objective functions. The main drawback lies in the selection of proper weights. Recently, evolutionary algorithms are used to find the nondominated optimal solutions called as Pareto optimal front in a single run. In recent years, Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm II (NSGA-II) finds increasing applications in solving multi objective problems comprising of conflicting objectives because of low computational requirements, elitism and parameter-less sharing approach. In this work, we propose a methodology which integrates NSGA-II and Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) for solving a two bar truss problem. NSGA-II searches for the Pareto set where two bar truss is evaluated in terms of minimizing the weight of the truss and minimizing the total displacement of the joint under the given load. Subsequently, TOPSIS selects the best compromise solution.

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