Automated Search for Optimal Cost of Geosynthetic-Reinforced Soil Walls

Resumo

Retaining structures are essential for large engineering works, such as bridges, dams and highways. One of the solutions for their application is through reinforced soil structures, which are characterized by the combination of soil — which performs well under compression — with materials that provide tensile strength. In light of this, several solutions for reinforcement have been developed, and among the most recent are geosynthetics. The stability analysis of a reinforced soil wall is typically performed using the global Factor of Safety (FS). The FS can be estimated with software programs such as GeoStudio, which enables the simulation of various solutions to assess how variations in each parameter affect the stability results. Consequently, it becomes possible to optimize the structure to avoid overdesign, identifying the most efficient scenario to minimize material consumption and costs, while adhering to the safety standards.Although they provide great ease in analyzing these structures, the software requires simulations with manual insertion of parameters, which becomes time-consuming when it is necessary to test different solutions. One way to streamline this process could be through the use of programs capable of interacting with GeoStudio to automatically insert variables. An example of such a tool is MATLAB, which is a programming and numerical computing software applicable in Engineering. In addition, the Sequential Quadratic Programming (SQP) method will be employed, which is a nonlinear optimization technique that solves constrained problems by linearizing the constraints at each iteration.Thus, considering the relevance of the application of reinforced soil structures, the aim of this work is to simulate a reinforced soil wall with geosynthetics in order to obtain the optimized cost. The goal is to find the most economical solution that meets the safety standards. For this purpose, the Deterministic Design Optimization method will be applied, which involves defining the input data, including the geotechnical parameters, geometry and costs of the simulation, programming a code capable of exchanging data between GeoStudio and MATLAB and integrate the programs varying the geometry multiple times in order automatically identify the optimized reinforced wall in terms of safety and cost. It is important to note that the remaining necessary stability analyses will also be carried out, such as the internal and external equilibrium of the wall.