Optimal placement of elastic steel diagonal braces using artificial bee colony algorithm

This paper presents a new algorithm to find the optimal distribution of steel diagonal braces (SDB) using artificial bee colony optimization technique. The four different objective functions are employed based on the transfer function amplitude of; the top displacement, the top absolute acceleration, the base shear and the base moment. The stiffness parameter of SDB at each floor level is taken into account as design variables and the sum of the stiffness parameter of the SDB is accepted as an active constraint. An optimization algorithm based on the Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) algorithm is proposed to minimize the objective functions. The proposed ABC algorithm is applied to determine the optimal SDB distribution for planar buildings in order to rehabilitate existing planar steel buildings or to design new steel buildings. Three planar building models are chosen as numerical examples to demonstrate the validity of the proposed method. The optimal SDB designs are compared with a uniform SDB design that uniformly distributes the total stiffness across the structure. The results of the analysis clearly show that each optimal SDB placement, which is determined based on different performance objectives, performs well for its own design aim.