An Overview of Recently Developed Coupled Simulation Optimization Approaches for Reliability Based Minimum Cost Design of Water Retaining Structures

This paper reviews several recently-developed techniques for the minimum-cost optimal design of water-retaining structures (WRSs), which integrate the effects of seepage. These include the incorporation of uncertainty in heterogeneous soil parameter estimates and quantification of reliability. This review is limited to methods based on coupled simulation-optimization (S-O) models. In this context, the design of WRSs is mainly affected by hydraulic design variables such as seepage quantities, which are difficult to determine from closed-form solutions or approximation theories. An S-O model is built by integrating numerical seepage modeling responses to an optimization algorithm based on efficient surrogate models. The surrogate models (meta-models) are trained on simulated data obtained from finite element numerical code solutions. The proposed methodology is applied using several machine learning techniques and optimization solvers to optimize the design of WRS by incorporating different design variables and boundary conditions. Additionally, the effects of several scenarios of flow domain hydraulic conductivity are integrated into the S-O model. Also, reliability based optimum design concepts are incorporated in the S-O model to quantify uncertainty in seepage quantities due to uncertainty in hydraulic conductivity estimates. We can conclude that the S-O model can efficiently optimize WRS designs. The ANN, SVM, and GPR machine learning technique-based surrogate models are efficiently and expeditiously incorporated into the S-O models to imitate the numerical responses of simulations of various problems.