  This paper presents comparison of several stochastic optimization algorithms
developed by authors in their previous works for the solution of some problems
arising in Civil Engineering. The introduced optimization methods are: the
integer augmented simulated annealing (IASA), the real-coded augmented
simulated annealing (RASA), the differential evolution (DE) in its original
fashion developed by R. Storn and K. Price and simplified real-coded
differential genetic algorithm (SADE). Each of these methods was developed for
some specific optimization problem; namely the Chebychev trial polynomial
problem, the so called type 0 function and two engineering problems - the
reinforced concrete beam layout and the periodic unit cell problem
respectively. Detailed and extensive numerical tests were performed to examine
the stability and efficiency of proposed algorithms. The results of our
experiments suggest that the performance and robustness of RASA, IASA and SADE
methods are comparable, while the DE algorithm performs slightly worse. This
fact together with a small number of internal parameters promotes the SADE
method as the most robust for practical use.
