Cost Effective Design of RC Building Frame Employing Unified Particle Swarm Optimization

Present paper deals with the cost effective design of reinforced concrete building frame employing unified particle swarm optimization (UPSO). Two building frames with G + 8 stories and G + 10 stories have been adopted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the present algorithm. Effect of seismic loads and wind load have been considered as per Indian Standard (IS) 1893 (Part-I) and IS 875 (Part-III) respectively. Analysis of the frames has been carried out in STAAD Pro software. The design loads for all the beams and columns obtained from STAAD Pro have been given as input of the optimization algorithm. Next, cost optimization of all beams and columns have been carried out in MATLAB environment using UPSO, considering the safety and serviceability criteria mentioned in IS 456. Cost of formwork, concrete and reinforcement have been considered to calculate the total cost. Reinforcement of beams and columns has been calculated with consideration for curtailment and feasibility of laying the reinforcement bars during actual construction. The numerical analysis ensures the accuracy of the developed algorithm in providing the cost optimized design of RC building frames considering safety, serviceability and constructional feasibilities.Further, Monte Carlo simulations performed on the numerical results, proved the consistency and robustness of the developed algorithm. Thus, the present algorithm is capable of giving a cost effective design of RC building frame, which can be adopted directly in construction site without making any changes.

Efficient RES Penetration under Optimal Distributed Generation Placement Approach

In this paper, a novel version of the Optimal Distributed Generation Placement (ODGP) problem regarding the siting and sizing of Renewable Energy Sources (RESs) units is presented, called Optimal RES placement (ORESP). Power losses constitute the objective function to be minimized, subject to operational constraints. The simultaneous installation of a mix of RESs is considered and the Capacity Factor (CF) ratio is used as an aid for taking into account: (a) the geographical characteristics of the area, in which the examined Distribution Network (DN) is placed, (b) the different weather conditions, and (c) the availability of RESs, all of that at the same time, while keeping the problem complexity at minimum. The contribution of this work is that the proposed methodology bypasses the weather uncertainties and, thus, the RESs’ power generation stochasticity and provides an adequate solution with minimum computational burden and time, since the proposed CF use allows solving the problem under a straightforward way. Unified Particle Swarm Optimization (uPSO) is used for solving ODGP and ORESP. Moreover, a sensitivity analysis regarding the CFs variations is performed and finally a comparison of the proposed method with a more realistic one is performed, to consolidate further the claims of this paper. The proposed method is evaluated on RES-region-modified 33- and 118 bus systems.