The Buttressed Walls Problem: An Application of a Hybrid Clustering Particle Swarm Optimization Algorithm
1
Escuela de Ingeniería en Construcción, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, Valparaíso 2362807, Chile
2
Institute of Concrete Science and Technology (ICITECH), Universitat Politècnica de València, 46022 València, Spain
*
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
†
These authors contributed equally to this work.
Mathematics 2020, 8(6), 862; https://doi.org/10.3390/math8060862
Received: 12 May 2020
/
Revised: 20 May 2020
/
Accepted: 22 May 2020
/
Published: 26 May 2020
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Optimization for Decision Making II)
The design of reinforced earth retaining walls is a combinatorial optimization problem of interest due to practical applications regarding the cost savings involved in the design and the optimization in the amount of CO emissions generated in its construction. On the other hand, this problem presents important challenges in computational complexity since it involves 32 design variables; therefore we have in the order of possible combinations. In this article, we propose a hybrid algorithm in which the particle swarm optimization method is integrated that solves optimization problems in continuous spaces with the db-scan clustering technique, with the aim of addressing the combinatorial problem of the design of reinforced earth retaining walls. This algorithm optimizes two objective functions: the carbon emissions embedded and the economic cost of reinforced concrete walls. To assess the contribution of the db-scan operator in the optimization process, a random operator was designed. The best solutions, the averages, and the interquartile ranges of the obtained distributions are compared. The db-scan algorithm was then compared with a hybrid version that uses k-means as the discretization method and with a discrete implementation of the harmony search algorithm. The results indicate that the db-scan operator significantly improves the quality of the solutions and that the proposed metaheuristic shows competitive results with respect to the harmony search algorithm.
View Full-Text
▼
Show Figures
Figure 1
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
MDPI and ACS Style
García, J.; Martí, J.V.; Yepes, V. The Buttressed Walls Problem: An Application of a Hybrid Clustering Particle Swarm Optimization Algorithm. Mathematics 2020, 8, 862. https://doi.org/10.3390/math8060862
AMA Style
García J, Martí JV, Yepes V. The Buttressed Walls Problem: An Application of a Hybrid Clustering Particle Swarm Optimization Algorithm. Mathematics. 2020; 8(6):862. https://doi.org/10.3390/math8060862
Chicago/Turabian StyleGarcía, José, José V. Martí, and Víctor Yepes. 2020. "The Buttressed Walls Problem: An Application of a Hybrid Clustering Particle Swarm Optimization Algorithm" Mathematics 8, no. 6: 862. https://doi.org/10.3390/math8060862
Find Other Styles
Note that from the first issue of 2016, MDPI journals use article numbers instead of page numbers. See further details here.
