Minimum Cost Design of Steel Plate Shear Walls via CBO Algorithm

The present study is concerned with the simultaneous optimization of the size of components and the arrangement of connections for performance-based seismic design of a low-rise SPSW. Design variables include the size of beams andcolumns, the thickness of the infill panels, the type of beam-to-column connections and the type of infill -to-boundaryelement connections. The objective function is considered to be the sum of the material cost and rigid connection fabrication cost. For comparison purposes, the SPSW model is also optimized with regards to two fixed connection arrangements. To fulfill the optimization task CBO algorithm is employed. The achieved results for the SPSWs demonstrate that incorporating the optimal arrangement of beam-to-column and infill-to-boundary frame connections into the optimization procedure results in considerable reduction of the overall cost