Assessment of masonry buildings subjected to landslide by strut-and-tie models

One of the main difficulties, when dealing with landslide structural vulnerability at the territorial scale, is the rapid diagnosis of the causes of crack patterns. In this scenario a new approach, based on a ‘simple model’ (i.e. the Load Path Method), has been proposed by Palmisano & Elia (2013) for the interpretation of the behaviour of masonry buildings subjected to landslide-induced settlements. However, the Load Path Method is very useful for rapidly searching the ‘most plausible solution’ instead of the exact solution. To find the solution, optimization algorithms are necessary. In this scenario, this article aims to show how the Bi-directional Evolutionary Structural Optimization method (Huang & Xie 2007) can be very useful to optimize the strut-and-tie models obtained by using the Load Path Method.