Simulation-Optimization Model for the Structural Design of Cantilever Retaining walls

Abstract

With the increasing trend of retaining wall construction in Egypt there is a need to reduce their construction costs. There are many types of retaining walls, cantilever, counterfort, buttressed and tied back walls. The common elements between all these types are the stem and the base. The cost of a retaining wall depends primarily on its material and secondarily on Excavation and backfill works. In this study, a new model is implemented in MATLAB to achieve the optimal design of the cantilever retaining wall elements. The design model is coupled with the shuffled complex evolution algorithm, developed at the University of Arizona (SCE-UA). This developed framework was applied to an existing model used by other researchers to demonstrate its efficiency and to obtain the most economical solution. The results proved that using the SCE-UA method provides superior results compared to those of other algorithms.