A Genetic Algorithm to optimize seismic retrofit interventions on existing RC structures

Recent European policies tend more and more to favour the rehabilitation (and reuse) of existing Reinforced Concrete (RC) structures, due to the high amount of land use of the continent. Consequently, seismic retrofit of existing RC structures is, nowadays, a hard technical task that civil engineers have to deal with. Generally speaking, such task can be addressed combining structure-level techniques (affecting strength and stiffness of the structure as a whole) with member-level techniques (able to enhance the performance of single members), although current technical codes do not provide commonly agreed rules to design a similar combined intervention. Moreover, this problem can be regarded as a constrained optimization problem (with respect to a certain criterion). Thus, considering the high number of design variables involved in, it might be suitable to solve such problem thanks to recently developed euristic algorithms, e.g. Genetic Algorithms (GAs). The present work aims at highlighting the latest advancements of a recently formulated optimization procedure for the design of seismic retrofit interventions for existing RC structures, based on the minimization of the economic cost of interventions.