Optimum Design of Gravity Retaining Walls Using Charged System Search Algorithm

This study focuses on the optimum design retaining walls, as one of the familiar types of the retaining walls which may be constructed of stone masonry, unreinforced concrete, or reinforced concrete. The material cost is one of the major factors in the construction of gravity retaining walls therefore, minimizing the weight or volume of these systems can reduce the cost. To obtain an optimal seismic design of such structures, this paper proposes a method based on a novel meta-heuristic algorithm. The algorithm is inspired by the Coulomb's and Gauss’s laws of electrostatics in physics, and it is called charged system search (CSS). In order to evaluate the efficiency of this algorithm, an example is utilized. Comparing the results of the retaining wall designs obtained by the other methods illustrates a good performance of the CSS. In this paper, we used the Mononobe-Okabe method which is one of the pseudostatic approaches to determine the dynamic earth pressure.