Synopsis:

Diminishing bonanzas of conventional energy and the need for sustainable and resilient development worldwide have created a significant demand for the optimization of structures and buildings without eliminating their important redundancies and making them vulnerable to what would otherwise be normal shocks and disturbances. This is particularly the case for the structures made of concrete, the world’s most widely used construction material. Its per capita annual consumption is approximately one metric ton, making it the second most consumed material after water. In addition, its production not only depletes raw material resources, but also contributes significantly (i.e. more than 5%) to the emission of anthropogenic, heat-trapping gases.
While the words optimization, sustainability, resilience and redundancy seem asynchronous to us, in the course of billions of years of evolutionary history, nature has heuristically developed a diverse, remarkably ingenious set of dynamic and robust strategies that have endowed creatures and organisms with optimum yet sustainably-resilient adaptability to their in-flux environments. During the recent decades, significant research efforts have been devoted to understanding these strategies and exploring their applicability to solve a variety of complex engineering problems. This talk describes the successful application of a few of these nature-inspired metaheuristics in the optimization of structural systems.

About the Speaker:

Dr. Yazdani is an assistant professor of civil engineering and the director of the Sustainable Infrastructure, Geotechnics and Materials (SIGMa) Lab at Howard University, Washington, DC. He received his PhD from the University of Oklahoma (OU) in December 2015.
Dr. Yazdani specializes in geotechnical engineering, multiscale design, characterization and simulation of materials, and probabilistic optimization using metaheuristic algorithms and data mining methods. He has published over 30 book chapters and journal and conference papers, and has received several competitive national awards including the best paper at the Deep Foundations Institute (DFI) Student Paper Competition in Phoenix, AZ and an ASTM International Project Grant in 2013 and the Best Paper Award at the 10th Annual Conference in Computer Science at OU in 2014.
Dr. Yazdani’s current interdisciplinary research is focused on fostering sustainability and resilience in civil infrastructure by developing high-performance and multifunctional construction materials, performance monitoring of structures using remote sensing and smart materials, addressing the geotechnical aspects of infrastructure (e.g. renewable energy systems) and incorporating uncertainty analysis and optimization into the analysis and design of geotechnical and structural systems.