Optimum design of cantilever retaining walls under seismic loads using a hybrid TLBO algorithm

Abstract

The main purpose of this study is to investigate the performance of the proposed hybrid teaching-learning based optimization algorithm on the optimum design of reinforced concrete (RC) cantilever retaining walls. For this purpose, three different design examples are optimized with 100 independent runs considering continuous and discrete variables. In order to determine the algorithm performance, the optimization results were compared with the outcomes of the nine powerful meta-heuristic algorithms applied to this problem, previously: the big bang-big crunch (BB-BC), the biogeography based optimization (BBO), the flower pollination (FPA), the grey wolf optimization (GWO), the harmony search (HS), the particle swarm optimization (PSO), the teaching-learning based optimization (TLBO), the jaya (JA), and Rao-3 algorithms. Moreover, Rao-1 and Rao-2 algorithms are applied to this design problem for the first time. The objective function is defined as minimizing the total material and labor costs including concrete, steel, and formwork per unit length of the cantilever retaining walls subjected to the requirements of the American Concrete Institute (ACI 318-05). Furthermore, the effects of peak ground acceleration value on minimum total cost is investigated using various stem height, surcharge loads, and backfill slope angle. Finally, the most robust results were obtained by HTLBO with 50 populations. Consequently the optimization results show that, depending on the increase in PGA value, the optimum cost of RC cantilever retaining walls increases smoothly with the stem height but increases rapidly with the surcharge loads and backfill slope angle.