Structural Design of Reinforced Concrete Tall Buildings: Evolutionary Computation Approach

The paper reports the results of a joint project on evolutionary design of reinforced concrete structures in tall buildings. It has been conducted at the Center for Concrete Structures at the Darmstadt University of Technology in Germany and in the School of Information Technology and Engineering at George Mason University. Its ultimate objective is to revolutionize design of both steel and concrete structural systems through the introduction of evolutionary design processes and tools. In this paper, we first provide a general overview of structural design of reinforced concrete structures in tall buildings. Next, various issues of design representation space are addressed, including a general design space for a building for which both crisp and fuzzy approaches are used. Also, a more specific issue of developing a design representation space for a reinforced concrete structure of a tall building is addressed and the concept of a floor template is introduced. The central part of the paper is a description of the proposed evolutionary design process and of the related computer design support tools. Finally, the results of various conducted design experiments are reported. They include the comparison of various selection strategies and the comparison of evolutionary design processes when crisp and fuzzy evaluation of designs is used.