Soft Computing Based Approaches for High Performance Concrete

High performance concrete (HPC) is a class of concrete that provides superior performance than those of conventional types. The enhanced performance characteristics of HPC are generally achieved by the addition of various cementitious materials and chemical and mineral admixtures to conventional concrete mix designs. These parameters considerably influence the compressive strength and workability properties of HPC mixes. An extensive understanding of the relation between these parameters and properties of the resulting matrix is required for developing a standard mix design procedure for HPC mix. To avoid testing several mix proportions to generate a successful mix and also simulating the behaviour of strength and workability improvement to an arbitrary degree of accuracy that often lead to savings in cost and time, it is idealistic to develop prediction models so that the performance characteristics of HPC mixes can be evaluated from the influencing parameters. Therefore, in this paper, linear genetic programming (LGP) is utilised for the first time in the literature to develop mathematical models to be able to predict the strength and slump flow of HPC mixes in terms of the variables responsible. Subsequently, the LGP based prediction results are compared with the results of proposed multilayer perceptron (MLP) in terms of prediction performance. Sand-cement ratio, coarse aggregate-cement ratio, water-cement ratio, percentage of silica fume and percentage of superplasticiser are used as the input variables to the models to predict the strength and slump flow of HPC mixes. A reliable database was obtained from the previously published literature in order to develop the models. The results of the present study, based on the values of performance measures for the models, demonstrated that for the prediction of compressive strength the optimum MLP model outperforms both the best team and the best single solution that have been created by LGP. It can be seen that for the slump flow the best LGP team solution has produced better results followed by the LGP best single solution and the MLP model. It can be concluded that LGPs are able to reach a prediction performance very close to or even better than the MLP model and as promising candidates can be utilised for solving such complex prediction problems.