Cost-safety optimization of steel-concrete composite beams using standardized formulation

Abstract

This paper presents a standardized formulation procedure for cost-safety optimization of steel-concrete composite beam (SCCB). To this aim, the SCCB was optimized based on the Load and Resistance Factor Design (LRFD) specification. A sensitivity analysis was also performed to investigate the influence of design parameters such as type and size of steel profile, concrete slab thickness, compressive strength of concrete and shear connector on SCCB.Numerical results highly verified the accuracy and the practical use of the formulation and implementation. The results also indicated that the standardized formulation has appropriate capability to yield significant saving on cost and improving the safety of SCCB. Moreover, a parametric study of random variable parameters, which might have an effect on the cost-safety optimization of SCCB was effectively conducted. A comparison study was also conducted to investigate the performance of the proposed method against Social Harmony Search (SHS), Ant Colony optimization (ACO) and Improved Ant Colony Optimization (IACO) methods and the results confirmed the higher accuracy of the proposed method than SHS, ACO and IACO methods in the optimization process and sensitivity analysis of SCCB. Therefore, the proposed method can be utilized in various structural design fields to obtain more feasible solutions.