SIZING OPTIMIZATION OF FRAME TUBE STRUCTURSSUBJECTED TOWIND INDUCED LOADING BY MINE BLAST ALGORITHM

Structural design of tall buildings is an engineering challenge due to considerable difference between several possible alternatives. Such asearch space is too complicated to be perfectly handled by a simple manual design. Alternatively, computerized sizing optimization as a systematic solution is concerned here using meta-heuristic methods. The capability of these methods to search for the global optimums in discrete problems is concerned to achieve the final practical design using any available list of structural sections.In this regard, the optimization problem is formulated to achieve minimal structural weight in tall buildings against gravitational and lateral loadings under codified stress and drift constraints in accordance with the Iranian codes of practice for steel structures (Part 6 & Part 10). Examples of three dimensional rigid frames are treated via two types of modeling;one by rigid floorswithoutrotationaldegreesoffreedomandthe other with both translational and rotational degrees of freedom. A number ofmeta-heuristic algorithmsarethus employed via comparative study of their performance in the current sizingproblem; they are Harmony Search,Particle Swarm Optimizationand recently developedMine Blast Optimization. Considerable benefit in material cost minimization is obtained using these algorithms using tuned parameters. Asaresult, theeffectiveness of HS is concluded to be less than the other two. It isalso declaredthat the taller the building, the more computational effort is required to achieve proper convergence. Furthermore, sensitivity of MBO algorithm related to its parameters isalso evaluated.