Artificial Neural Network and Optimization Algorithm To Improve Soil Resistance By Means of Aggregation Size Variation

Nowadays, extensive researches are conducted on soil improvement and most of them are focused on the enhancement of soil strength properties. in this study, the aggregation of soil particles including gravel, sand, and clay was investigated on soil resistance. to do this, the number of 25 different testing experiments were experimentally performed according to the design of experiment (doe). the soil strength parameter was determined by means of direct shear tests on large samples. based on the experimental results, the effect of aggregation size on shear strength was extensively investigated. to do this, artificial neural network (ann) was employed to evaluate the effect of different combinations of soil particles on bearing capacity. to provide more precise predictive model, the ann was trained using the genetic algorithm (ga). after that, the optimal condition of mix design with optimal load-bearing capacity was found by a hybrid strategy of eoa-ann. it was obtained 1091.94 (kpa) that had not been reported using the experiments. to evaluate the reliability of the proposed method, a new experimental test was conducted based on the optimal parameters found by hybrid strategy and it was verified with corresponding estimated ones. at the end, very good agreement was reported between the new experiment and the optimal results. it shows that the employed intelligent method in this paper can be successfully used for the enhancement of soil properties in other investigations.