During the past 45 years a significant amount of research has been published
in the area of structural optimization. The great majority of these papers
deal with the minimization of the weight of the structure. While weight of a
structure constitutes a significant part of the cost, a minimum weight design
is not necessarily the minimum cost design. Only a small fraction of the
papers published on structural optimization deal with the cost optimization
problem. Most of these papers deal with structural elements such as beams.
Few journal papers have been published on cost optimization of realistic
three-dimensional structures. As such, there is a need to perform research on
cost optimization of realistic three-dimensional structures, especially large
structures with hundreds of members where optimization can result in sub-
stantial savings. The results of such research efforts will be of great value to
practicing engineers.
Another important reason for advocating and advancing the use of opti-
mization technology in the design of structures is automating the complicated
process of structural design. In the ground-breaking book by H. Adeli and H.
S. Park, Neurocomputing for Design Automation, CRC Press, Boca Raton,
Florida, 1998, a patented model was presented for fully automated design of
very large structures and used for the fully automated design of a 144-story
superhigh-rise steel modified tube-in-tube structure with over 20 000 mem-
bers subjected to the actual constraints of commonly used design code, the
American Institute of Steel Construction Allowable Stress Design (ASD)
and Load and Resistance Factor Design (LRFD) codes. Today, even the
most advanced commercial design software systems do not provide a fully
automated system. Fully automated structural design and cost optimization
are where the large-scale design technology should be heading. As the first
book on cost optimization of structures we hope that this book will guide
the profession in that direction.