SNO Based Optimization for Shaped Beam Reflectarray Antennas

The design of a shaped beam reflectarray is a challenging issues. The problem can be hardly addressed by deterministic techniques or standard optimization due to the elevated number of design variables and its non-convex nature while can be much easily solved adopting Evolutionary Optimization Algorithms. In particular, in this paper a recently introduced evolutionary approach, named Social Network Optimization (SNO) has been applied to the design of a reduced size shaped beam reflectarray: the obtained numerical results are promising and prove the effectiveness of the adopted method.