• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
• /
• v.49 no.1
• /
• pp.65-80
• /
• 2014

This paper reports on the development of a minimum cost design model and its application for obtaining economic designs for reinforced High Strength Concrete (HSC) T-sections in bending under ultimate limit state conditions. Cost objective functions, behavior constraint including material nonlinearities of steel and HSC, conditions on strain compatibility in steel and concrete and geometric design variable constraints are derived and implemented within the Conjugate Gradient optimization algorithm. Particular attention is paid to problem formulation, solution behavior and economic considerations. A typical example problem is considered to illustrate the applicability of the minimum cost design model and solution methodology. Results are confronted to design solutions derived from conventional design office methods to evaluate the performance of the cost model and its sensitivity to a wide range of unit cost ratios of construction materials and various classes of HSC described in Eurocode2. It is shown, among others that optimal solutions achieved using the present approach can lead to substantial savings in the amount of construction materials to be used. In addition, the proposed approach is practically simple, reliable and computationally effective compared to standard design procedures used in current engineering practice.

• Advances in Computational Design
• /
• v.8 no.4
• /
• pp.295-307
• /
• 2023

This paper presents an optimization of the reinforced concrete ribbed slab in terms of minimum CO₂ emissions and an economic justification of the final optimal design. The design variables are six geometry variables including the slab thickness, the ribs spacing, the rib width at the lower and toper end, the depth of the rib and the bar diameter of the reinforcement, and the seventh variable defines the concrete strength. The objective function is considered to be the minimum amount of carbon dioxide gas (CO₂) emission and at the same time, the optimal design is economical. Seven significant design constraints of American Concrete Institute's Standard were considered. A robust metaheuristic optimization method called improved dolphin echolocation and ant colony optimization (IDEACO) has been used to obtain the best possible answer. At optimal design, the three most important sources of CO₂ emissions include concrete, steel reinforcement, and formwork that the contribution of them are 63.72, 32.17, and 4.11 percent respectively. Formwork, concrete, steel reinforcement, and CO₂ are the four most important sources of cost with contributions of 67.56, 19.49, 12.44, and 0.51 percent respectively. Results obtained by IDEACO show that cost and CO₂ emissions are closely related, so the presented method is a practical solution that was able to reduce the cost and CO₂ emissions simultaneously.

• Proceedings of the Korea Water Resources Association Conference
• /
• 2021.06a
• /
• pp.145-145
• /
• 2021

Water distribution networks (WDNs) are designed to satisfy water requirement of an urban community. One of the central issues in human history is providing sufficient quality and quantity of water through WDNs. A WDN consists of a great number of pipelines with different ages, lengths, materials, and sizes in varying degrees of deterioration. The available annual budget for rehabilitation of these infrastructures only covers part of the network; thus it is important to manage the limited budget in the most cost-effective manner. In this study, a novel pipe replacement scheduling approach is proposed in order to smooth the annual investment time series based on a life cycle cost assessment. The proposed approach is applied to a real WDN currently operating in South Korea. The proposed scheduling plan considers both the annual budget limitation and the optimum investment on pipes' useful life. A non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm is used to solve a multi-objective optimization problem. Three decision-making objectives, including the minimum imposed LCC of the network, the minimum standard deviation of annual cost, and the minimum average age of the network, are considered to find optimal pipe replacement planning over long-term time period. The results indicate that the proposed scheduling structure provides efficient and cost-effective rehabilitation management of water network with consistent annual budget.

• Journal of Biosystems Engineering
• /
• v.7 no.1
• /
• pp.42-52
• /
• 1982

This study was intended to develop a cost function for the natural air in-bin drying: system which could lead to an optimization of the drying system cost. Based on the cost function developed, a series of simulated drying tests were conducted with 10-year weather data (1970~1979) for 7 different regions by applying an appropriate levels of system factors. System performance factors treated in this study were initial moisture content, airflow rate, bin diameter and grain depth. An optimization procedure to find the least cost system was developed as follows: First, the worst year of the past decade was determined in consideration of the dryiang time and maximum dry matter loss. Second, the minimum airflow rate for a fixed bin diameter and grain depth was determined. Third, the optimum grain depth was found for the minimum airflow rate with different initial moisture contents and bin diameters. The results obtained in this study are summarized as follows: 1. The optimization procedure developed in this study was able to reduce the time and efforts significantly. 2. Optimum values of drying parameters including airflow rate, grain depth, and fan size were determined for different initial moisture contents and bin diameters in each region. The results are shown in Tables 3 to 9. 3. Optimum grain depths decreased as the initial moisture content and airflow rate increased. 4. Drying time for the least cost system should be reduced with higher initial moisture content and lower drying potential to prevent grain spoilage. 5. The fixed cost was 65 to 75 percent of the total system cost and the variable cost was 25 to 35 percent. To reduce the fixed cost it is desirable to use a drying bin 2 or 3 times a year.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
• /
• v.61 no.4
• /
• pp.475-481
• /
• 2017

An overhead travelling crane structure of two doubly symmetric welded box beams is designed for minimum cost. The rails are placed over the inner webs of box beams. The following design constraints are considered: local buckling of web and flange plates, fatigue of the butt K weld under rail and fatigue of fillet welds joining the transverse diaphragms to the box beams, fatigue of CFRP (carbon fibre reinforced plastic) laminate, deflection constraint. For the formulation of constraints the relatively new standard for cranes EN 13001-3-1 (2010) is used. To fulfill the deflection constraint CFRP strengthening should be used. The application of CFRP materials in strengthening of steel and concrete structures are widely used in civil engineering applications due to their unique advantages. In our study, we wanted to show how the mechanical properties of traditional materials can be improved by the application of composite materials and how advanced materials and new production technologies can be applied. In the optimization the following cost parts are considered: material, assembly and welding of the steel structure, material and fabrication cost of CFRP strengthening. The optimization is performed by systematic search using a MathCAD program.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
• /
• v.13 no.8
• /
• pp.790-797
• /
• 2007

This paper proposes a new measure of cost function ruggedness in local optimization with DEAS. DEAS is a computational optimization method developed since 2002 and has been applied to various engineering fields with success. Since DEAS is a recent optimization method which is rarely introduced in Korean, this paper first provides a brief overview and description of DEAS. In minimizing cost function with this non-gradient method, information on function shape measured automatically will enhance search capability. Considering the search strategies of DEAS are well designed with binary matrix structures, analysis of search behaviors will produce beneficial shape information. This paper deals with a simple quadratic function contained with various magnitudes of noise, and DEAS finds local minimum yielding ruggedness measure of given cost function. The proposed shape information will be directly used in improving DEAS performance in future work.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
• /
• v.45 no.1
• /
• pp.111-127
• /
• 2013

In this paper, a new version of gravitational search algorithm based on opposition-based learning (OBGSA) is introduced and applied for optimum design of reinforced concrete retaining walls. The new algorithm employs the opposition-based learning concept to generate initial population and updating agents' position during the optimization process. This algorithm is applied to minimize three objective functions include weight, cost and $CO_2$ emissions of retaining structure subjected to geotechnical and structural requirements. The optimization problem involves five geometric variables and three variables for reinforcement setups. The performance comparison of the new OBGSA and classical GSA algorithms on a suite of five well-known benchmark functions illustrate a faster convergence speed and better search ability of OBGSA for numerical optimization. In addition, the reliability and efficiency of the proposed algorithm for optimization of retaining structures are investigated by considering two design examples of retaining walls. The numerical experiments demonstrate that the new algorithm has high viability, accuracy and stability and significantly outperforms the original algorithm and some other methods in the literature.

• Korean Management Science Review
• /
• v.25 no.2
• /
• pp.73-80
• /
• 2008

The location area planning is to assign cells to the location areas of a wireless communication network in an optimum manner. The two important cost components are cost of location update and cost of paging that are of conflicting in nature; i.e., minimizing the registration cost might increase the search cost. Hence, it is important to find a compromise between the location update and paging operations such that the cost of mobile terminal location tracking cost is a minimum. The complete mobile network is divided into location areas. Each location area consists of a group of cells. In fact this is shown to be an NP-complete problem in an earlier study. In this paper, we use an ant colony optimization method to obtain the best/optimal group of cells for a given a network.

• 제어로봇시스템학회:학술대회논문집
• /
• 1997.10a
• /
• pp.811-814
• /
• 1997

In this paper, the torque optimization of a kinematically redundant manipulator for minimizing the torque demands is discussed. The minimum torque solution based on a local optimization has been known to encounter the instability problem and then the global torque optimization was suggested as one of the alternatives. Herein, by adopting the infinity-norm rather than the 2-norm for the magnitude of torques, we are to propose a new cost function more advantageous to the avoidance of torque limits. By the way, a solution to the global torque optimization formulated with the new cost function can not be obtained by the previous methods due to their difficulties such as inability to treat discontinuous cost functions and various constraints on the joint variables. Thus, to overcome those deficiencies, we are developing a new approach using the dynamic programming. The effectiveness of the proposed method is shown through simulation examples for a 3-link planar redundant manipulator.

• Journal of the Society of Naval Architects of Korea
• /
• v.48 no.2
• /
• pp.178-182
• /
• 2011

Generally in order to reduce the steel weight of stiffened plate, stiffener spaces tend to be narrow and the plate gets thin. However, it will involve more fabrication cost because it can lead to the increase of welding length and the number of structural members. In the yard, the design which is able to reduce the total fabrication cost is needed, although it requires more steel weight. The purpose of this study is to find optimum stiffener spaces to minimize the fabrication cost for the cargo tank of LPG Carriers. Global optimization methods such as ES(Evolution Strategy) and GA(Genetic Algorithm) are introduced to find a global optimum solution and the sum of steel material cost and labor cost is selected as main objective function. Convergence degree of both methods in according to the size of searching population is examined and an efficient size is investigated. In order to verify the necessity of the optimum design based on the cost, minimum weight design and minimum cost design are carried out.