Use of genetic algorithms for the automated design of residential steel roof trusses

While steel has been one of the primary materials for structural systems, it is only recently that its use for residential buildings is being explored. In the present work, GA's are used in developing an automated design system for the design of steel roof trusses. The focus of the research is to find the effect of schema representation, schema survival, type of crossover, problem definition, the size of the population, and the number of design iterations on the computational expense and the fitness value (cost of the truss). Depending on the density of the ground structure and the size of the chromosome, a newly developed methodology has led to a computationally effective GA process when combined with the elitist, one-point and uniform crossover strategies. It should be noted that practical designs can be automatically obtained on personal computers in a very reasonable amount of time.