Automatic minimum weight design of steel frames

Abstract

The automatic plastic design of structural frames can be treated by the method of linear programming. The number of variables, however, increases so fast with the complexity of the frame that only simple frames can be handled by this method even on a large electronic computer. In the present paper a method is proposed, which considers alternately two different requirements that a frame must satisfy, and thereby greatly reduces the size of the problem. Following the Introduction, Part I of the paper presents the method with reference to a simple numerical example; Part II establishes the general applicability of the proposed method.Part III presents some lemmas of practical importance, and some discussion, with examples, of special considerations that may arise in the design of actual frames.