Using Machine Learning Technologies to Design Modular Buildings

Abstract

The article discusses a solution to the relevant task of analyzing and designing modular buildings made of blocks to be used in industrial and civil engineering. A block that represents a container is a combination of plate and beam systems. The criteria for its failure include both the strength of the individual elements and the loss of stability in a corrugated web. Methods of engineering analysis are hardly applicable to this system. Numerical analysis based on the finite element method is time-consuming, and this fact limits the number of design options for modular buildings made of blocks. Adjustable machine learning models are proposed as a solution to these problems. Decision trees are made and clustered into a single ensemble depending on the values of the design parameters. Key parameters determining the structures of decision trees include design steel resistance values, types of loads and the number of loadings, and ranges of rolled sheet thickness values. An ensemble of such models is used to take into account the nonlinear strain of elements. Piecewise approximation of the dependencies between components of the stress–strain state is used for this purpose. Linear regression equations are subjected to feature binarization to improve the efficiency of nonlinearity projections. The identification of weight coefficients without laborious search optimization methods is a distinguishing characteristic of the proposed models of steel blocks for modular buildings. A modular building block is used to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed models. Its purpose is to accommodate a gas compressor of a gas turbine power plant. These machine learning models can accurately spot the stress–strain state for different design parameters, in particular for different corrugated web thickness values. As a result, ensemble models predict the stress–strain state with the coefficient of determination equaling 0.88–0.92.

Keywords

• machine learning
• modular buildings
• linear regression
• decision tree