Mitigating excessive stress, a primary cause of structural failure, deformation, and premature fatigue, is critical in engineering design. Evolutionary (BESO) and proportional topology optimization (PTO) are standard heuristic approaches, yet their relative computational efficiency and accuracy for stress problems are not well understood. Addressing this gap, this paper conducts the first comprehensive comparisons of BESO and PTO for the stress minimization problem, also investigating the impact of the p-norm. Optimization results reveal PTO’s significant advantage in computational speed. BESO sometimes produces designs with lower maximum stresses, though with higher structural compliance.

1. Driven by increasing demands for lightweight, high-performance and multifunctional engineering structures, hierarchical structural design has emerged as an important direction in modern structur...