To improve the efficiency of the structural optimization design in truss calculation, an improved chicken swarm optimization algorithm was proposed for truss structure optimization. The chicken swarm optimization is a novel swarm intelligence algorithm. In the basic chicken swarm optimization algorithm, the concept of combining chaos strategy and reverse learning strategy was introduced in the initialization to ensure the global search ability. And the inertia weighting factor and the learning factor were introduced into the chick position update process, so as to better combine the global and local search. Finally, the overall individual position of the algorithm was optimized by the differential evolution algorithm. The improved algorithm was tested by multipeak function and applied to the truss simulation experiment. The study provided a new method for the truss structure optimization.