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Mathematical Problems in Engineering
Volume 2012 (2012), Article ID 301628, 10 pages
doi:10.1155/2012/301628
Optimum Design of Gravity Retaining Walls Using Charged System Search Algorithm
1Marand Faculty of Engineering, University of Tabriz, Tabriz, Iran
2Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Amirkabir University of Technology, Tehran, Iran
3Department of Civil Engineering, University of Tabriz, Tabriz, Iran
4Department of Civil Engineering, Islamic Azad University, Maragheh Branch, Maragheh, Iran
Received 6 June 2012; Accepted 11 September 2012
Academic Editor: Sheng-yong Chen
Copyright © 2012 S. Talatahari et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Abstract
This study focuses on the optimum design retaining walls, as one of the familiar types of the retaining walls which may be constructed of stone masonry, unreinforced concrete, or reinforced concrete. The material cost is one of the major factors in the construction of gravity retaining walls therefore, minimizing the weight or volume of these systems can reduce the cost. To obtain an optimal seismic design of such structures, this paper proposes a method based on a novel meta-heuristic algorithm. The algorithm is inspired by the Coulomb's and Gauss’s laws of electrostatics in physics, and it is called charged system search (CSS). In order to evaluate the efficiency of this algorithm, an example is utilized. Comparing the results of the retaining wall designs obtained by the other methods illustrates a good performance of the CSS. In this paper, we used the Mononobe-Okabe method which is one of the pseudostatic approaches to determine the dynamic earth pressure.