Comparative seismic design optimization of spatial steel dome structures through three recent metaheuristic algorithms

Steel dome structures, with their striking structural forms, take a place among the impressive and aesthetic load bearing systems featuring large internal spaces without internal columns. In this paper, the seismic design optimization of spatial steel dome structures is achieved through three recent metaheuristic algorithms that are water strider (WS), grey wolf (GW), and brain storm optimization (BSO). The structural elements of the domes are treated as design variables collected in member groups. The structural stress and stability limitations are enforced by ASD-AISC provisions. Also, the displacement restrictions are considered in design procedure. The metaheuristic algorithms are encoded in MATLAB interacting with SAP2000 for gathering structural reactions through open application programming interface (OAPI). The optimum spatial steel dome designs achieved by proposed WS, GW, and BSO algorithms are compared with respect to solution accuracy, convergence rates, and reliability, utilizing three real-size design examples for considering both the previously reported optimum design results obtained by classical metaheuristic algorithms and a gradient descent-based hyperband optimization (HBO) algorithm.