Automated Optimum Design of Light Steel Frame Structures in Chinese Rural Areas Using Building Information Modeling and Simulated Annealing Algorithm

Many manual calculations and repeated modeling are required during the traditional structural design process. However, due to the high cost, rural buildings in China cannot be professionally designed and verified by designers as urban buildings, and their safety and economy cannot easily meet the requirements. Building Information Modeling (BIM) technology and intelligent optimization algorithms can effectively improve the structural design process and reduce design costs, but their applications in the field of rural residential buildings in China are limited. Therefore, this paper presents an innovative framework that realizes the structural design of rural light steel frame structures on the BIMBase platform (widely used BIM software in China, BIMBase 2023R1.3). Based on the parametric library of structural components built on standardized component coding, the framework completes the rapid modeling of rural light steel frame structures and the interaction between the BIMBase platform and structural analysis software, SATWE. The improved two-stage simulated annealing (SA) algorithm is applied to the structural design of rural buildings to obtain a design scheme that meets the design requirements and reduces the material consumption as much as possible. Two prefabricated rural light steel frame structures were analyzed to evaluate the efficiency of the proposed framework. The results show the feasibility of the proposed framework. Compared with traditional manual design methods, the design period can be reduced by six times while maintaining comparable levels of material consumption and structural design indicators. © 2023 by the authors.