Life-cycle cost assessment of mid-rise and high-rise steel and steel-reinforced concrete composite minimum cost building designs

The traditional trial-and-error design approach is inefficient to determine an economical design satisfying also the safety criteria. Structural design optimization, on the other hand, provides a numerical procedure that can replace the traditional design approach with an automated one. The objective of this work is to propose a performance-based seismic design procedure, formulated as a structural design optimization problem, for designing steel and steel-reinforced concrete composite buildings subject to interstorey drift limitations. For this purpose, eight test examples are considered, in particular four steel and four steel-reinforced concrete composite buildings are optimally designed with minimum initial cost. Life-cycle cost analysis (LCCA) is considered as a reliable tool for measuring the damage cost due to future earthquakes that will occur during the design life of a structure. In this study, LCCA is employed for assessing the optimum designs obtained for steel and steel-reinforced concrete composite design practices. Copyright (c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.