Given the magnitude and the importance of piled foundations that support high-performance structures such as bridges, high-rise buildings, power stations and offshore platforms, it becomes a necessity to find the best pile foundation design in terms of economy and performance. The foundation cost, for this type of structural systems, can vary from 5% to 20% of the construction cost of the structure while the number of piles required might exceed several thousands. In this study the formulation of an optimization problem is proposed, aiming at achieving the most economical (optimum) design of the pile foundation layout. Two different design procedures are adopted to assess the performance of each candidate design obtained during the optimization process and one real-world structure is considered for testing the proposed formulation.
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