Application of DCOC for Minimum Cost Design of Reinforced Concrete T-Beams

This paper describes the application of discretized continuum-type optimality criteria (DCOC) for design of the reinforced concrete T-beams. The cost of construction as objective function which includes the costs of concrete, reinforced steel and formwork is minimized. The design constraints include limits on the maximum deflection in a given span on bending and shear strengths and optimality criteria is given based on the well blown Kuhn-Tucker necessary conditions, followed by an iterative procedure for designs when the design variables are the depth and the steel ratio. The versatility of the DCOC technique has been demonstrated by considering numerical examples which have one and five span RC T-beams.