DEVELOPMENT OF NOVEL METAHEURISTIC ALGORITHMS AND COORDINATED MULTI-HEIGHT OPTIMIZATION FRAMEWORKS FOR THE DESIGN OF MECHANICALLY STABILIZED EARTH WALLS

Date

2026-9-3

Author

Kılıç, Görkem

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Mechanically stabilized earth (MSE) wall design is iterative, and cost efficiency may depend on the designer's experience. This study develops two optimization algorithms to shorten this process through automation while producing feasible and economical designs: Collective Optimization with Memory and Population-Adaptive Sampling Strategy (COMPASS) and its hybrid variant incorporating differential evolution operators (COMPASSDE). The design problems formulated with discrete and continuous variables are solved by models, considering internal and external stability requirements under static and seismic loading, along with reinforcement and fill costs. The models’ performances are verified against the MSEW+ program. The study compares both algorithms with 13 algorithms from the literature across three wall configurations and 17 different heights. COMPASS performs better with less number of function evaluations, whereas COMPASSDE achieves better performance as the number of evaluations increases. The study also develops two design frameworks with different degrees of variable sharing that consider wall sections of different heights within an engineering project to optimize design and total cost. Analyses of this high-dimensional engineering problem show that COMPASSDE performs better than the other optimization methods considered. The practical applicability of the proposed frameworks is evaluated using a real-world MSE wall project and its existing MSEW+ design. Both frameworks produce feasible designs and reduce reinforcement costs by 12.2% and 10.4%, respectively, compared with the existing design, while also reducing total cost. The findings indicate that the proposed frameworks can be used in engineering analyses to balance cost efficiency, reinforcement coordination, and design standardization at the project level.

Subject Keywords

Mechanically Stabilized Earth Walls, Metaheuristic Optimization, COMPASS, COMPASSDE, Cost Optimization

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/120991

Collections

Graduate School of Natural and Applied Sciences, Thesis