20 NEURAL DYNAMICS MODEL FOR ENGINEERING DESIGN OPTIMIZATION

search techniques for the minimum weight design of hat-shaped cold-formed light gauge steel members.
The design was based on the 1968 American Iron and Steel Institutes (AISI) Specifications for the Design
of Cold-Formed Structural Steel Members (AISI, 1968). They presented only one example without any
convergence curves. The method used had difficulty finding the optimum depth and did not guarantee that
the solution obtained was a local optimum design. Still, considering the highly nonlinear nature of the
optimization problem their work should be considered significant, especially noting that it was done some
30 years ago.

3.3
MINIMUM WEIGHT DESIGN OF COLD-FORMED STEEL BEAMS
The optimization problem is defined as:
Minimize
(3.1)
subject to
(3.2)
(3.3)
where W is the weight of the structure, X is the vector of design variables, I is the number of design
constraints, NL is the number of load cases, and XL and Xu are the lower and upper bounds on the design
variables, respectively. In the design of cold-formed steel beams, X consists of the cross-sectional
dimensions of the members. The exact form of the objective function and the constraints depend on the
shape of the section used (Figure 3.1).
The designs are based on two different specifications: (1) The AISI Specification for the Design of Cold-
formed Steel Structural Members1989 Edition with 1989 Addendum (AISI, 1989), hereafter referred to as
the AISI ASD Specification, and (2) the AISI Load and Resistance Factor Specification for the Design of
Cold-Formed Steel Structural Members (AISI, 1991), hereafter referred to as the AISI LRFD Specification.
The loading on the beams is assumed to be a uniformly distributed load and/or any number of concentrated
loads. Full lateral bracing, no lateral bracing, or lateral bracing at any number of specified points along the
length of the beam may be assumed.
The beam span and loading is shown in Figure 3.1a. The optimization model presented in this chapter is
general and can be applied to any kind of cross section. As examples, however, we consider three
commonly-used shapes: hat, I, and Z shapes. The variables involved in their design are shown in
Figures 3.1b-d. For these shapes, the weight (objective function) is defined as:
(3.4)
where is the unit weight of steel, L is the span length of the beam, Nw is the number of webs (equal to 1
for Z shape and 2 for hat and I shapes), and r, X1, X2, X3, and X4 are the cross-sectional dimensions
identified in Figure 3.1.
In the AISI ASD approach, no load factors are applied to the nominal loads to obtain the design loads in
the evaluation of the design strengths. In the AISI LRFD approach, on the other hand, various linear
combinations of the nominal loads are used for the design loads which are then compared with the design
strengths. The design strength is the nominal strength divided by a factor of safety ( ) in the AISI ASD
approach, and the nominal strength multiplied by a resistance factor ( ) in the AISI LRFD approach. In the
following paragraphs, the design constraints are formulated in a general form applicable to both AISI ASD