PERFORMANCE-BASED LAYOUT OPTIMIZATION FOR BRACED STEEL FRAMES USING FINITE DIFFERENCE ALGORITHM

The efficiency of braced structures depends significantly on structure response under seismic loads. The main design challenge for these type of structures is to select shape, number of spans, and type of connections appropriately. Therefore, introducing an optimized and cost-effective design including a certain level of safety and performance against natural hazards seems to be an inevitable necessity. The present work introduces a performance-based design for braced steel structures as well as an optimized arrangement of braces and connection types via using finite difference algorithm. The results show that the latter two factors are very important and necessary to achieve an optimized design for braced steel structures.

Keywords:

discrete optimization , braced steel frame , performance-based design , finite difference algorithm , layout optimization.