Investigating the Efficiency of Swarm Algorithms for Bridge Strengthening by Conversion to Tied-Arch: A Numerical Case Study on San Luis Bridge

One of the current problems in engineering is the collapse of bridges that cross rivers due to the scour of their piers. This can lead to collapse and thus high costs associated with reconstruction. One way of avoiding bridge collapses is the installation of an arch-shaped superstructure that goes over the bridge, which by means of hangers lifts the deck to replace the damaged piers. A problem arises when the hangers are tight since keeping the properties of the deck of the original bridge is mandatory in order to avoid serious damages to the bridge. This paper proposes the use of algorithms with great performance in the literature, which are Black Hole and cuckoo search, to find the correct order to tight the hangers as well as the magnitude that minimizes the difference in stresses along the concrete with respect to the original bridge. Finally, the results associated with various real instances are presented according to the San Luis bridge, where the proper functioning of the Black Hole Algorithm can be observed, as opposed to cuckoo search and 4 other techniques. This implies that the use of metaheuristic techniques presents acceptable results in reasonable calculation times, validating the implementation of these techniques for this problem.