Experimental investigation of local searches for optimization of grillage-type foundations

Abstract

In grillage-type foundations, beams are supported by piles. The main goal of engineering design is to achieve the optimal pile placement scheme in which the minimal number of piles is used and all the reactive forces do not exceed the allowed values. This can be achieved by searching for the positions of piles where the difference between the maximal reactive forces and the limit magnitudes of reactions for the piles is minimal. In this study, the values of the objective function are given by a separate modeling package. Various algorithms for local optimization have been applied and their performance has been investigated and compared. Parallel computations have been used to speed-up experimental investigation.