Structural Optimization in Civil Engineering: A Literature Review

Since tremendous resources are consumed in the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry, the sustainability and efficiency in this field have received increasing concern in the past few decades. With the advent and development of computational tools and information technologies, structural optimization based on mathematical computation has become one of the most commonly used methods for the sustainable and efficient design in the field of civil engineering. However, despite the wide attention of researchers, there has not been a critical review of the recent research progresses on structural optimization yet. Therefore, the main objective of this paper is to comprehensively review the previous research on structural optimization, provide a thorough analysis on the optimization objectives and their temporal and spatial trends, optimization process, and summarize the current research limitations and recommendations of future work. The paper first introduces the significance of sustainability and efficiency in the AEC industry as well as the background of this review work. Then, relevant articles are retrieved and selected, followed by a statistical analysis of the selected articles. Thereafter, the selected articles are analyzed regarding the optimization objectives and their temporal and spatial trends. The four major steps in the structural optimization process, including structural analysis and modelling, formulation of optimization problems, optimization techniques, and computational tools and design platforms, are also reviewed and discussed in detail based on the collected articles. Finally, research gaps of the current works and potential directions of future works are proposed. This paper critically reviews the achievements and limitations of the current research on structural optimization, which provide guidelines for future research on structural optimization in the field of civil engineering.