Evolutionary Design of Steel Structures in Tall Buildings

This paper presents results of a study on evolutionary computation in the design of the steel structural systems of tall buildings. It describes results of extensive research on both short-term (up to a few hundred generations) and long-term evolutionary design processes (at least a few thousand generations). The experiments were conducted with Inventor 2001, an evolutionary design support tool developed at George Mason University, for generating conceptual and detailed designs of steel structural systems in tall buildings. First, the paper discusses conceptual design of steel structural systems in tall buildings and briefly introduces Inventor 2001 as well as its design representation and evolutionary computation characteristics. Next, it provides the results obtained from systematic parametric design experiments conducted with Inventor 2001. The objective of these experiments was to qualitatively and quantitatively investigate evolution of steel structural systems of tall buildings during a multistage evolutionary design process as well as the influence of various evolutionary computation parameters. Mutation and crossover rates, population size, the length of the evolutionary processes, and the importance of a symmetry requirement have been analyzed and results produced. Emergence of structural shaping patterns has been also studied and several interesting patterns found in the evolutionary design process. Finally, research conclusions are presented as well as recommendations for further research and development of evolutionary design support tools.