• Structural Monitoring and Maintenance
• /
• v.9 no.4
• /
• pp.337-357
• /
• 2022

The objective of this study is to present a data-driven machine learning (ML) framework for predicting ultimate shear strength and failure modes of reinforced concrete ledge beams. Experimental tests were collected on these beams with different loading, geometric and material properties. The database was analyzed using different ML algorithms including decision trees, discriminant analysis, support vector machine, logistic regression, nearest neighbors, naïve bayes, ensemble and artificial neural networks to identify the governing and critical parameters of reinforced concrete ledge beams. The results showed that ML framework can effectively identify the failure mode of these beams either web shear failure, flexural failure or ledge failure. ML framework can also derive equations for predicting the ultimate shear strength for each failure mode. A comparison of the ultimate shear strength of ledge failure was conducted between the experimental results and the results from the proposed equations and the design equations used by international codes. These comparisons indicated that the proposed ML equations predict the ultimate shear strength of reinforced concrete ledge beams better than the design equations of AASHTO LRFD-2020 or PCI-2020.