APPLICATION OF EVOLUTIONARY COMPUTATION IN STRUCTURAL DESIGN - A COMPREHENSIVE REVIEW OF EVOLUTIONARY COMPUTATION IN STRUCTURE

Abstract

Over the past few decades improvement in technology had brought forth progress in various fields, especially in the computation related field. The increasing complexity of computational technology allows for high speed processing of complex analytical data which was previously deemed impossible (Rafal, Arciszewski, & De Jong, 2005). Therefore, the 21th century is also known as the century of the digital information. The introduction of Building Information Modelling (BIM) changed the role of computers in design as the availability of analytic building information within digital models enables better cross discipline collaborations between different professions, narrowing the cross discipline gap between different professions. The improved inter-portability of various programs used by various professionals gave rise to a boom in a new field of computation design, Evolutionary Computation (EC). Unlike traditional linear design workflow, EC is more versatile and applicable to various stages of design. This flexibility benefits the building design industry especially in the structural aspect in particular, bringing progress to the structural design field. This paper will investigate the use of parametric design in the structural field of the design process, forming a design paradigm of methodologies and focus on the use of EC in structural design of the design process. The main objective of this paper is to compile a comprehensive literature review on the topic of evolutionary computational design in structure engineering. The focus will be on providing a larger perspective of parametric structural design. The paper will include general introduction of the evolutionary design system in the 2nd section, a more detail introduction of the EC system and its application in the 3rd section. And the 4th section will include literature reviews of existing case studies and research papers of structural evolutionary computation examples. The 5th section will be the summary and discussion of potential and future applications of the field and the conclusion of the paper.