An Evolutionary Neuro-Fuzzy-Based Approach to Estimate the Compressive Strength of Eco-Friendly Concrete Containing Recycled Construction Wastes

There has been a significant increase in construction and demolition (C&D) waste due to the growth of cities and the need for new construction, raising concerns about the impact on the environment of these wastes. By utilising recycled C&D waste, especially in concretes used in construction, further environmental damage can be prevented. By using these concretes, energy consumption and environmental impacts of concrete production can be reduced. The behaviour of these types of concrete in laboratories has been extensively studied, but reliable methods for estimating their behaviour based on the available data are required. Consequently, this research proposes a hybrid intelligent system, Fuzzy Group Method of Data Handling (GMDH)–Horse herd Optimisation Algorithm (HOA), for predicting one of the most important parameters in concrete structure design, compressive strength. In order to avoid uncertainty in the modelling process, crisp input values were converted to Fuzzy values (Fuzzification). Next, using Fuzzy input variables, the group method of data handling is used to predict the compressive strength of recycled aggregate concrete. The HOA algorithm is one of the newest metaheuristic algorithms being used to optimise the Fuzzy GMDH structure. Several databases containing experimental mix design records containing mixture components are gathered from published documents for compressive strength to assess the accuracy and reliability of the proposed hybrid Fuzzy-based model. Compared to other original approaches, the proposed Fuzzy GMDH model with the HOA optimiser outperformed them in terms of accuracy. A Monte Carlo simulation is also employed for uncertainty analysis of the empirical, standalone, and hybridised models in order to demonstrate that the evolutionary Fuzzy-based approach has less uncertainty than the standalone methods when simulating compressive strength.

This creative work has been published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC-BY 4.0) license which allows copying, and redistribution as well as adaptation of the original work provided appropriate credit is given to the original author and the conditions of the license are met.