Optimum Design of Gravity Retaining Walls Using Charged System Search Algorithm

This study focuses on the optimum design retaining walls, as one of the familiar types of the retaining walls which may be constructed of stone masonry, unreinforced concrete, or reinforced concrete. The material cost is one of the major factors in the construction of gravity retaining walls therefore, minimizing the weight or volume of these systems can reduce the cost. To obtain an optimal seismic design of such structures, this paper proposes a method based on a novel meta-heuristic algorithm. The algorithm is inspired by the Coulomb's and Gauss’s laws of electrostatics in physics, and it is called charged system search (CSS). In order to evaluate the efficiency of this algorithm, an example is utilized. Comparing the results of the retaining wall designs obtained by the other methods illustrates a good performance of the CSS. In this paper, we used the Mononobe-Okabe method which is one of the pseudostatic approaches to determine the dynamic earth pressure

An Objective-Based Design Approach of Retaining Walls Using Cuckoo Search Algorithm

In the past two decades, there has been ongoing trend to design retaining walls in an optimal way rather than the conventional trial and-error approach. In this study, reinforced concrete cantilever retaining wall is optimized using the Cuckoo Search (CS) algorithm, a metaheuristic swarm-based method that imitates the reproductive behavior of cuckoo birds. To obtain the optimal solution, design requirements are expressed as constraints to overcome violated solutions. Together with a mathematical definition of the objective function, three constraint groups are used to represent the geotechnical, structural, and geometrical design considerations. In addition, an objective-based design approach is introduced to optimize the cost and weight objective functions simultaneously. The performance of theCS is proved through its application on cantilever retaining walls, where two numerical examples are solved in terms of both cost and the weight of the walls. The results indicate that the CS is be a viable solution for the optimum design of retaining walls