A COMPARISON OF OPTIMIZATION ALGORITHMS FOR THE PRE-SIZING OF REINFORCED CONCRETE STRUCTURES

Resumo

Structural engineering is an opportune field for numerical optimization as it pursuits economical designs
that comply with safety and usability requirements. The search for the dimensions of the cross-sections of beams
and columns is a major step on the design of reinforced concrete frames, which will implicate greatly on the
stiffness of the structure and its displacements. Then, with the objective of enhancing the structural design process,
this work analyzes three algorithms to optimize the problem of obtaining a minimum concrete volume while
complying with the stability criteria of small displacements, imposed by the Gamma-Z parameter. The algorithms
for the interior point method, active set and sequential quadratic programming are briefly discussed and their
implementations in the pre-sizing of concrete buildings are compared in terms of efficiency and quality of the
solution by several numerical simulations.