Optimum Design of a Ribbed Slab: A Brief Overview

This chapter aimed to optimize the design of reinforced cement concrete (RCC) ribbed slab, also known as waffle slab according to the Indian RCC code (IS 456:2000). The combined cost of the reinforcement, concrete, and formwork, which adds up to the cost of the ribbed slab, is the objective function of the optimisation problem. The direct design approach was used to analyse the waffle slab. The objective function was created after a thorough analysis of the ribbed slab. For various grades of concrete, the optimisation process was used. The comparative findings for various concrete grades are listed and presented in tabular form. Optimization for reinforced cement concrete (RCC) ribbed slab is illustrated and the results of the optimum design and conventional design are compared. The optimization problem is a constrained nonlinear programming problem (NLPP). The mathematical model was analyzed by using MATHEMATICA software. The nonlinear programming problem was solved by using the fixed step size method. In the fixed step size method, the problem was checked for different values with constant step length. From the analysis, it was found that savings of up to 25 percent can be obtained by optimizing the reinforced ribbed slab.