Optimum design of a reinforced concrete beam using artificial bee colony algorithm

Optimum cost design of a simply supported reinforced concrete beam is presented in this paper. In the formulation of the optimum design problem, the height and width of the beam, and reinforcement steel area are treated as design variables. The design constraints are implemented according to ACI 318-08 and studies in the literature. The objective function is taken as the cost of unit length of the beam consisting the cost of concrete, steel and shuttering. The solution of the design problem is obtained using the artificial bee colony algorithm which is one of the recent additions to metaheuristic techniques. The artificial bee colony algorithm is imitated the foraging behaviors of bee swarms. In application of this algorithm to the constraint problem, Deb's constraint handling method is used. Obtained results showed that the optimum value of numerical example is nearly same with the existing values in the literature.