The problem of design optimization is of high industrial interest, and has been extensively studied for years, with excellent results. However, there is the well‐known issue of a reasonable balance between the computational effort usually required by stochastic methods, and the fact that deterministic optimizers, even though much more efficient, are not guaranteed to localize a good minimum, as they can remain trapped in the first found local one. To overcome these problems, the authors developed a hybrid strategy, which gave good results in terms of speed and reliability of the obtained optima, especially when the objective function is obtained through a finite element analysis, due, for example, to the absence of an analytical solution of the problem, and the direct use of a stochastic method would be unfeasible for practical purposes, because of the intolerable processing time required. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.