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In structural design, either the experience of designer is used or a uniform grouping is usually utilized to group the elements. This type of grouping affects the fundamental cost of the buildings, including the cost of concrete, steel and formwork, as well as secondary costs such as laboratory, checking, fabrication and etc. However, the secondary costs are not usually considered in the cost function. Strategies can also be used to automate the grouping of members in structural design. In this strategy beams and columns are automatically grouped into a limited number of groups to achieve the lowest cost. In this study, enhanced colliding bodies optimization algorithm is used to automatically group the beams and columns of the reinforced concrete structures and also to optimize their cost. The proposed procedure applied to three reinforced concrete frames with four, eight and twelve stories and the influence of automatic grouping of the members in optimal cost is investigated. Using this method, the beams and columns are automatically grouped and the results show that the optimal cost obtained from the automatic grouping is less than the manual grouping of the members.

Keywords: optimal cost, reinforced concrete frames, automatic grouping, enhanced colliding bodies optimization (ECBO).

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