Soft Computing Methods in Civil Engineering

Copyright © 2015 Siamak Talatahari et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Demand for lightweight, efficient, and low cost structures seems mandatory because of growing realization of the rarity of raw materials and rapid depletion of convention energy sources. This requires engineers to be aware of optimization techniques. Designing, analyzing, and solving civil engineering problems can be very large scale and can be highly nonlinear, and to find solutions to these problems is often very challenging. In the past two decades, soft computing methods are becoming an important class of efficient tools for developing intelligent systems and providing solutions to complicated engineering problems. The papers selected for this special issue represent a good panel in recent challenges. The topics of these papers are connected with the computational intelligence methods and their application in civil and hydraulic engineering. An investigation on different metaheuristics abilities for engineering problems was studied by O. Adekanmbi and P. Green. They utilized the third version of generalized differential evolution (GDE) for solving practical engineering problems. GDE3 metaheuristic modifies the selection process of the basic differential evolution and extends DE/rand/1/bin strategy. Performance-based seismic design of steel frames using the colliding bodies optimization (CBO) algorithm as new optimization method was presented by H. Veladi. A pushover analysis method based on semirigid connection concept was developed and the CBO algorithm is employed to find optimum seismic design of frame structures. H. Veladi solved two numerical examples from literature and show the power or weakness of this new algorithm. A parametric study of nonlinear seismic response analysis of transmission line structures and the effect analysis of strain rate on power transmission tower-line system under seismic excitation were developed by L. Tian et al. in two papers. In one of them, nonuniform ground motions are generated using a stochastic approach based on random vibration analysis. Then, the effects of multicomponent ground motions, correlations among multicomponent ground motions, wave travel, coherency loss, and local site on the responses of the cables were investigated using nonlinear time history analysis method. The results showed the multicomponent seismic excitations should be considered, but the correlations among multicomponent ground motions could be neglected. While, in the other, a three-dimensional finite element model of a transmission tower-line system was created based on …