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The use of new intelligent techniques in designing retaining walls

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Abstract

The stability of retaining walls against overturning is analyzed in this study using artificial intelligence methods. Five input parameters including wall height, wall thickness, soil friction angle, soil density, and stone cement mixture density were varied and 2000 cases were considered in developing the predictive models. Using the artificial neural network (ANN) method, eight prediction models were developed and evaluated based on the coefficient of determination (R2) and the root mean square error. R2 values of 0.9740 and 0.9824 for training and testing datasets, respectively (for the best model), indicate the level of ANN capability in predicting safety factor (SF) of retaining walls. After developing the ANN model, the ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithm was used to maximize the safety factor of the wall by varying the input parameters. In fact, the best ANN model was selected to be used as a modeling function in ACO algorithm. The SF result from optimization section was obtained as 3.057 which show a significant difference from the mean SF values used in the modeling. It can be concluded that ACO may be used as a powerful optimization algorithm in optimizing SF results of retaining walls.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Amirkabir University of Technology, Tehran, 15914, Iran

    Mohammadreza Koopialipoor

  2. Centre of Tropical Geoengineering (GEOTROPIK), Faculty of Civil Engineering, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, 81310, Johor Bahru, Malaysia

    Bhatawdekar Ramesh Murlidhar, Danial Jahed Armaghani & Edy Tonnizam Mohamad

  3. Faculty of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Colorado School of Mines, Golden, CO, 80401, USA

    Ahmadreza Hedayat

  4. Department of Geotechnics and Transportation, Faculty of Civil Engineering, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM), 81310, Skudai, Johor, Malaysia

    Behrouz Gordan

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  1. Mohammadreza Koopialipoor
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  2. Bhatawdekar Ramesh Murlidhar
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Correspondence to Mohammadreza Koopialipoor or Danial Jahed Armaghani.

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Koopialipoor, M., Murlidhar, B.R., Hedayat, A. et al. The use of new intelligent techniques in designing retaining walls. Engineering with Computers 36, 283–294 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00366-018-00700-1

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