Study of Safety of High-Rise Buildings Using Evolutionary Search

Abstract

The paper applies a computer-based method involving evolutionary search and Pareto optimization to investigate the load-path safety of high-rise commercial office buildings against progressive collapse under abnormal loading. The study was motivated by the progressive-collapse failure of the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York on September 11, 2001. The assessment of load-path safety against progressive collapse is based on the degree of force redundancy that the structural system of a building has. A Pareto-optimal tradeoff surface formed by a population of conceptual designs for a particular office building project is established in the 3D-space of capital cost, operating cost and income revenue. Computer gray-scale filtering of the cost-revenue tradeoff surface is employed to highlight the relative safety of the different building designs. The paper concludes with some general remarks concerning the design of buildings to withstand or delay progressive collapse under abnormal loading.