Gholamreza davoudi - Department of engineering, Ahvaz branch, Islamic Azad University, Ahvaz, Iran.
hossein towsyfyan - School of Computing and Engineering, University of Huddersfield, UK
seyed aanan adnani salehi - Iranian National Standards Organization, Department of manufacturing engineering, Arvandan nonprofit higher education institute. Khorramshahr, Khouzestan, Iran
Majed Ghayyem - Department of Manufacturing Engineering, Arvandan nonprofit higher education institute Khorramshahr, Iran.

The great flexibility of cross-sectional profiles of cold-formed steel makes the selection of the most economical section difficult for a particular situation. In this paper, the Imperialist Competitive Algorithm (ICA) is used to find optimum cross-sectional profiles of cold-formed steel beams for various load level. The Imperialist Competitive Algorithm as a socio-politically inspired optimization strategy is inspired by competition mechanism among Imperialists and colonies, in contrast to evolutionary algorithms. To validate the proposed approach, the results of ICA were finally compared with the Genetic Algorithm (GA). Based on the results, ICA has demonstrated excellent capabilities such as accuracy, faster convergence and better global optimum achievement

ICA- Cold-formed steel channel beams