Urban Sustainability and Infrastructure Development: Optimal Weight Design of RC Frame Using Meta-heuristic Technique

An optimisation program that minimises the overall weight of RC frames in order to avoid material wastage and thus, supports sustainability is developed in the current research. The optimisation technique used is a meta-heuristic technique called Improved Ray Optimisation. Generally, most of the optimisation work done on concrete frames is aimed at minimising the cost of the structure and very less research is done on minimising weight of the concrete structures. The optimisation program takes into consideration all the provisions mentioned in IS456:2000 [5] Indian Standard Code for safety and serviceability of RC structure. In frame optimisation two structural components are considered, i.e. beams and columns and their weight is calculated. The optimisation program is developed using three computer applications, i.e. SAP2000 software, Excel and MATLAB. The code that runs optimisation program is written in MATLAB application. The optimisation program is applied on a generalized RC frame modelled in SAP2000 [6] software and the results obtained when compared with the SAP2000 software showed nearly 15% reduction in weight of the frame.