Preliminary layout design of buildings has a substantial effect on the ultimate design of structural components and accordingly influences the construction cost. Exploring structurally efficient forms and shapes during the conceptual design stage of a project can also facilitate the optimum integrated design of buildings. This paper presents an automated method of determining column layout desi...

This paper presents an efficient optimization procedure to find the optimal shapes of double curvature  arch  dams  considering  fluid–structure  interaction  subject  to  earthquake  loading. The optimization is carried out using a combination of the magnetic charged system search, big bang-big crunch algorithm and artificial neural network methods. Performing the finite element  analysis  dur...

Tunnel structures are known as expensive infrastructures and determining optimum designs of these structures can play a great role in minimizing their cost. The formulation of optimum design of industrial tunnel sections as an optimization is considered in this paper and then the enhanced charged system search, as a recently developed meta-heuristic approach, has been applied to solve the probl...

Graph theory based methods are powerful means for representing structural systems so that their geometry and topology can be understood clearly. The combination of graph theory based methods and some metaheuristics can offer effective solutions for complex engineering optimization problems. This paper presents a Charged System Search (CSS) algorithm for the free shape optimizations of thin-wall...

Water distribution networks are one of the important and costly infrastructures of cities and many meta-heuristic algorithms in standard or hybrid forms were used for optimizing water distribution networks. These algorithms require a large amount of computational cost. Therefore, the converging speed of algorithms toward the optimization goal is as important as the goal itself. In this paper, a...

The minimum crossing number problem is among the oldest and most fundamental problems arising in the area of automatic graph drawing. In this paper, eight population-based meta-heuristic algorithms are utilized to tackle the minimum crossing number problem for two special types of graphs, namely complete graphs and complete bipartite graphs. A 2-page book drawing representation is employed for ...

In this article optimal design of shear walls is performed under seismic loading. For practical aims, a database of special shear walls is created. Special shear walls are used for seismic design optimization employing the charged system search algorithm as an optimizer. Constraints consist of design and performance limitations. Nonlinear behavior of the shear wall is taken into account and per...

This study presents shape optimization of a gravity dam imposing stability and principal stress constraints. A gravity dam is a large scale hydraulic structure consisting of huge amount of concrete material. Hence, an optimum design gives a cost-benefit structure due to the fact that small changes in shape of dam cross-section leads to large saving of concrete volume. T...

This paper presents application of an improved Harmony Search (HS) technique and Charged System Search algorithm (CSS) to estimate transport energy demand in Iran, based on socio-economic indicators. The models are developed in two forms (exponential and linear) and applied to forecast transport energy demand in Iran. These models are developed to estimate the future energy demands based on pop...