Optimum design of continuous beam

At the stage of preliminary design of bridge and pipeline with continuous beam type, the determination of distances between the supports is an important task. In this paper, according to the principle of complementary energy and Mohr integration, taking sectional stiffness and support number of continuous beam as design variables and determining number of supports in terms of Fibonacci search, we convert complex optimization problem of varying dimension of design variables with integer variables to one of fixed dimension of continuous variables, which may be solved by method of sequential quadratic programming. For the sake of the demonstration, some examples are given in the paper.