STRUCTURAL OPTIMISATION IN BUILDING DESIGN

This paper aims to contribute to the reduction of the significant gap between the state of-the-art of structural design optimisation in research and its practical application in the building industry.. The research objective has been aided by collaboration with structural designers at Arup. It is shown how Evolutionary Structural Optimisation can be adapted to improve applicability to practical bracing design problems by considering symmetry constraints, rules for element removal and addition, as well as the definition of element groups to enable inclusion of aesthetic requirements.. optimally-directed designs. The method developed consistently finds the global optimum for a small 2D planar test problem, generates high-performance designs for larger scale tasks and shows the potential to generate designs meeting user-defined aesthetic requirements..