Optimum Design of Storm Sewer Systems by Using Harmony Search Optimization Approach

The main objective of this study is to propose an optimization approach for solving the optimum storm sewer system design problems. In the proposed approach, the heuristic harmony search optimization algorithm is used to minimize the construction cost of the system by considering the slopes of the pipes as the decision variables. For the identified slopes, diameters of the pipes are selected from the discrete set of pipe diameters which is available in market. During the search process, all the physical and managerial constraints are considered by means of the penalty function approach. The applicability of the proposed simulation-optimization approach is evaluated on a benchmark example given in literature. Identified results indicated that the proposed simulation-optimization approach results with the better results than those obtained by using different deterministic and heuristic approaches in literature and can be effectively used to solve the optimum storm sewer system design problems.