Usage of Optimization Techniques in Civil Engineering During the Last Two Decades

In the real world, there are many problems in which it is desirable to optimize one or more objective functions at the same time. These are known as single and multi-objective optimization problems respectively and continuous research is being conducted in this field and nature inspired heuristic optimization methods (also called advanced optimization algorithms) are proving to be better than the classical deterministic methods and thus are widely used. These algorithms have been applied to many engineering optimization problems and proved effective for solving some specific kinds of problems. In this paper, a review of the most popular optimization algorithms used in different problems related to the civil engineering during the last two decades is presented. It is hoped that this work will be useful to researchers involved in optimization.

Keywords:Optimization algorithms; Civil engineering; Review