Ahmad AZIZI - MSc. Student, Kharazmi University, Tehran, Iran
Mohsen SHAHROUZI - Assistant Professor, Faculty of engineering, Kharazmi University, Tehran, Iran
Afshin MESHKAT-DINI - Assistant Professor, Faculty of engineering, Kharazmi University, Tehran, Iran

Structural design of tall build ings is an engineering challenge due to conside rable difference between several possible alternatives. Such asearch space is too complicated to be perfectly handled by a simple manual design. Alternatively, comp uterized sizing optimization as a systematic so lution is concerned here using meta-heuristic methods. The capability of these methods to search for the glo bal optimums in discrete problems is concerned to achievet he final practical design using any available list of structural sections.In this regard, the optimization probl em is formulated to achieve minimal structural weight in tall buildings against gravitational and lateral loa dings under codified stress and drift constraints in accordance with the Iranian codes of practice for steel s tructures (Part 6 & Part 10). Examples of three dimensional rigid frames are treated via two types of modeling;one by rigid floorswithoutrotationaldegreesoffrreedomandthe other with both translational and rotational deg rees of freedom. A number ofmeta-heuristic algo rithmsarethus employed via comparative study of their perfo rmance in the current sizingproblem; they are H armony Search,Particle Swarm Optimizationand recently d evelopedMine Blast Optimization. Considerable benefit in material cost minimization is obtained using thes e algorithms using tuned parameters. Asaresult, theeffectiveness of HS is concluded to be less than the other two. It isalso declaredthat the taller the building, the more computational effort is required to achieve proper convergence. Furthermore, sensitivity of MBO algorithm related to its parameters isalso evaluated.

Optimization, Meta-heuristics, Mine Blast Algorithm, Tallbuilding, WindLoading