Computational & Technology Resources
an online resource for computational,
engineering & technology publications
Civil-Comp Proceedings
ISSN 1759-3433
CCP: 92
PROCEEDINGS OF THE FIRST INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON SOFT COMPUTING TECHNOLOGY IN CIVIL, STRUCTURAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL ENGINEERING
Edited by: B.H.V. Topping and Y. Tsompanakis
Paper 30

Metamodeling based Structural Optimisation for Earthquake Loading

E. Salajegheh and S. Gholizadeh

Department of Civil Engineering, University of Kerman, Iran

Full Bibliographic Reference for this paper
E. Salajegheh, S. Gholizadeh, "Metamodeling based Structural Optimisation for Earthquake Loading", in B.H.V. Topping, Y. Tsompanakis, (Editors), "Proceedings of the First International Conference on Soft Computing Technology in Civil, Structural and Environmental Engineering", Civil-Comp Press, Stirlingshire, UK, Paper 30, 2009. doi:10.4203/ccp.92.30
Keywords: earthquake, wavelet transform, genetic algorithm, neural networks.

Summary
The structural optimisation for earthquake induced loads is a computationally intensive task. In order to deal with this problem a hybrid methodology is proposed. In this methodology a serial integration of wavelet transforms, neural networks and evolutionary algorithms are utilized to achieve the optimisation task.

In order to reduce the computational work of the structural time history analysis, a discrete wavelet transform (DWT) is used by means of which the number of points in the earthquake record is decreased. In this work, Daubechies [1] wavelet function (Db2) is selected to decompose the earthquake record. The DWT process is repeated in two stages, and the number of points of the original record is reduced to 0.25 of the primary points.

Despite the major reduction in the computational effort of the time history analysis, the optimisation process requires a great number of such analyses; thus the overall time of the optimisation process is still very long. In this work to overcome this difficulty, a metamodel, called self-organizing generalized regression (SOGR), is proposed to accurately predict the time history response of the structures. Training the SOGR is performed in two phases. In the first phase, the input and target spaces are classified as the similar data is located in some subspaces. The classification is performed by a self-organizing map (SOM) neural network. In the second phase, a distinct generalized regression (GR) neural network is trained for each subspace using its training data. Therefore, the SOGR consists of a classifying unit and a set of parallel GR neural networks which are locally trained on the input space.

A slight modification is performed on the virtual sub-population (VSP) [2] algorithm to more efficiently achieve the optimisation task. In this modified VSP the probability of the mutation and crossover are determined adaptively. This evolutionary algorithm is called adaptive virtual sub-population (AVSP) algorithm.

In order to investigate the efficiency of the proposed methodology, a six-storey space frame structure is designed for optimal weight for the El Centro earthquake. The numerical results demonstrate the efficiency and computational advantages of the proposed methodology. It is impressive to say that in this paper the time of optimisation employing neural networks, including data generation, training and testing is about 0.12 times of exact optimisation while, the errors of approximation are insignificant.

References
1
I. Daubechies, "The wavelet transform, time-frequency localization and signal analysis", IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, 36, 961-1005, 1990. doi:10.1109/18.57199
2
E. Salajegheh, S. Gholizadeh, "Optimum design of structures by an improved genetic algorithm using neural networks", Advances in Engineering Software, 36, 757-767, 2005. doi:10.1016/j.advengsoft.2005.03.022

purchase the full-text of this paper (price £20)

go to the previous paper
go to the next paper
return to the table of contents
return to the book description
purchase this book (price £78 +P&P)