OPTIMUM DESIGN OF REINFORCED CONCRETE FRAMES USING BAT META-HEURISTIC ALGORITHM

The main aim of the present study is to achieve optimum design of reinforced concrete (RC) plane moment frames using bat algorithm (BA) which is a newly developed meta-heuristic optimization algorithm based on the echolocation behaviour of bats. The objective function is the total cost of the frame and the design constraints are checked during the optimization process based on ACI 318-08 code. Design variables are the cross-sectional assignments of the structural members and are selected from a data set containing a finite number of sectional properties of beams and columns in a practical range. Three design examples including four, eight and twelve story RC frames are presented and the results are compared with those of other algorithms. The numerical results demonstrate the superiority of the BA to the other meta-heuristic algorithms in terms of the frame optimal cost and the convergence rate.