Optimization of dimension and placement of the shear walls in reinforced concrete buildings by using artificial bee colony algorithm

In recent years, with the prominence of the concept of performance in the design of buildings, design principles based on deformation have gained importance as well as design according to strength. Design according to deformation, which offers more practical approaches for building safety and prevention of excessive displacements, aims to limit the damages of the elements due to the horizontal displacements. The section damage limits are set by the regulation and the performance classes are determined according to the displacement level of the structure. In such approaches, one of the most important elements that provide the necessary rigidity in the structure and prevent excessive displacements is the shear walls (SW). It should be aimed to implement the SW design, providing the rigidity during the design and as being one of the low-cost and easy-to-apply methods in building retrofitting, at the lowest cost in a way to provide the desired performance in each project. Although there are general criteria for SW placement that provides the desired displacement level and does not cause torsion, it is necessary to search for the most economical solution. Since the comparison of dozens of possible options will take a long time, the most economical solution should be determined by using optimization methods. For this reason, in this study, a Visual Basic program called "Ekonomik Perde Yerleşim Optimizasyonu" (e-PYO) was produced to determine the placement of the SW's by using the "Artificial Bee Colony Algorithm" (ABC). According to the program algorithm; By scanning all possible solutions, in order to find the lowest cost among the reasonable solutions, SW combinations selected with the ABC algorithm are applied to the SAP2000 model, and the building performance is examined over the floor displacements in X&Y directions. Selected SW combinations are applied to the model with the "Open Application Programming Interface" (OAPI) module of SAP2000 and the data is read. The program makes SW placements depending on the axis system and can place a maximum of 9 SWs in both directions for structures with a maximum of 10 axes in both directions. In this study, a typical hospital building without SWs belonging to the Ministry of Health was examined and the placement of the SW's necessary for the required performance level was determined. It has been observed that the most suitable SW placement combination can be determined quickly by scanning all layout alternatives with the generated algorithm.