Design of simply supported composite slabs of steel and concrete via metaheuristic optimization algorithm

Climate change has been greatly influenced by human actions since the eighteenth century. Civil construction produces a lot of CO2 that corroborates global warming, impacting climate and temperature. This sector has been striving to achieve innovative ideas that reduce these effects. Thus, the study analyzed simply supported composite slabs of steel and concrete to obtain solutions that provide a sustainable development for civil construction. This study aimed to determine better and more accepted solutions than the ones proposed by manufacturers regarding CO2 emissions. The design of the elements follows the ABNT NBR 8800:2008 standard. For the analyses, a computational tool was developed, and the optimization was performed using Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) and Grey Wolf Optimizer (GWO). To achieve optimized solutions regarding sustainability, the algorithms more frequently selected less thick steel formworks, smaller concrete cover, lower characteristic strength of concrete, and higher additional positive reinforcement rate, since the weight of the steel formwork and the concrete were the variables with the greatest influence on CO2 emissions. On the other hand, the insertion of additional reinforcement also reduced these emissions since this positive reinforcement function with lower CO2 emissions than the steel formwork. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.