DESIGNING GABION STRUCTURES UNDER MULTI-CRITERIA OBJECTIVES WITH GOAL PROGRAMMING

Abstract

Gabion structure is a set of stacked prefabricated cages filled with rocks. These gabion cages are made of steel wire, polypropylene, polyethylene, or nylon. Constructing these gabion cages usually follows supplier guidelines or governmental agency design standards. Designing this gabion structure, at a minimum, must satisfy many design criteria in passing external stability in sliding, overturning, and bearing capacity of the foundation. Good gabion design requires a balance of the toe bearing stress and heel bearing stress.  With this requirement for the design of gabion structures to meet multi-criteria objectives, goal programming, which is a multi-criteria optimization technique, is used in this study. A 3-meter gabion example is used as a based design. Then, mixed integer nonlinear programming is introduced to rearrange a set of varying sized gabion cages to minimize the gabion weight and passing external stability criteria. Two goal programming models are introduced to meet the two design criteria in minimizing gabion weight and balancing the vertical stresses. The two goal programming models give the same optimum solution with the minimum weight of 48 kN/m and eccentricity of 0.002 meter, In contrast, the original example gives the weight of 61.92 kN/m and eccentricity of 0.086 meter.