Analyzing the bearing capacity of shallow foundations on two-layered soil using two novel cosmology-based optimization techniques

Abstract

Due to the importance of accurate analysis of bearing capacity in civil engineering projects, this paper studies the efficiency of two novel metaheuristic-based models for this objective. To this end, black hole algorithm (BHA) and multi-verse optimizer (MVO) are synthesized with an artificial neural network (ANN) to build the proposed hybrid models. Based on the settlement of a two-layered soil (and a shallow footing) system, the stability values (SV) of 0 and 1 (indicating the stability and failure, respectively) are set as the targets. Each model predicted the SV for 901 stages. The results indicated that the BHA and MVO can increase the accuracy (i.e., the area under the receiving operating characteristic curve) of the ANN from 94.0% to 96.3 and 97.2% in analyzing the SV pattern. Moreover, the prediction accuracy rose from 93.1% to 94.4 and 95.0%. Also, a comparison between the ANN's error decreased by the BHA and MVO (7.92% vs. 18.08% in the training phase and 6.28% vs. 13.62% in the testing phase) showed that the MVO is a more efficient optimizer. Hence, the suggested MVO-ANN can be used as a reliable approach for the practical estimation of bearing capacity.