Stacking sequence optimization of arbitrary quadrilateral laminated plates for maximum fundamental frequency by hybrid whale optimization algorithm

A Hybrid Whale Optimization Algorithm (HWOA) is proposed to optimize the stacking sequence of arbitrary quadrilateral composite plates. By introducing an adversarial learning strategy, a broader search is performed on the initial domain to generate a better initial population. The mutation operator and opposition-based learning (OBL) strategy of the differential evolution (DE) algorithm are combined to maintain the diversity of the evolutionary process. In addition, the nonlinear convergence factor is introduced to improve the global exploration ability of HWOA when dealing with discrete problems. The stacking sequences of quadrilateral composite plates with different boundary conditions and geometries are optimized to maximize the fundamental frequency. The optimized results of HWOA are compared with those of whale optimization algorithm (WOA), Aquila optimizer (AO), artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm, DE algorithm and layerwise optimization approach (LOA) algorithm. The results show that HWOA with multiple strategy combinations has good global search capability and robustness, and thus HWOA is a good candidate optimization algorithm for composite plate optimization.