Steel, concrete and their combination materials are the most 6commonly used materials for civil engineering structural systems such as buildings, bridge structures and other structures. Recently, however, fiber reinforced polymer (FRP) composites, a relatively new composite material made of fibers and polymer resins, have been gradually used in structural systems as an alternative structural material. This paper describes a comparison of design strength equations for steel column and FRP composite column based on design philosophies. The safety factors used in allowable stress design (ASD) are relatively higher in FRP structural design than steel structural design. Column critical stress equations of FRP composites column from an experimental study can be represented by Euler elastic buckling equation at the long-range of slenderness, and an exponential form at the short-range of slenderness as defined in Load and Resistance Factor Design (LRFD) of steel column. The column strength of steel and FRP composite columns in large slenderness is independent of material strength, this result verified the elastic buckling equation as derived by Eq. (15) and Eq. (5).

The purpose of this study is to improve convergence speed of topology optimization procedure using the existing ESO method and to deal with topology decision of the truss structures according to a boundary condition, such as cantilever type. At the existing ESO topology optimization procedure for the truss structures, the adjustment of member sizes according to target stress has been executed by increasing or reducing a very small value from each member size. In this case, it takes too much iteration till convergence. Accordingly, it is practically hard to obtain optimum topology for a large scale structures. For that reason, it is necessary to improve convergence speed of ESO method more effectively. During the topology decision procedure, member sizes are adjusted by calculating approximate solution for member sizes corresponding to the target stress at every step, the new member sizes are adjusted by such method are applied in FEA procedure of next step.

Generally, truss design has been determined by the designer's experience and intuition. But if we perform the most economical structural design we must consider not only cross-sections of members but also configurations(howe, warren and pratt types etc.) of single truss as the number of panel and truss height. The purpose of this study is to develope automated optimum design techniques for steel truss structures considering cross-sections of members and shape of trusses simultaneously. As the results, it could be possible to find easily the optimum solutions subject to design conditions at the preliminary structural design stage of the steel truss structures. In this study, the objective function is expressed as the whole member weight of trusses, and the applied constraints are as stresses, slenderness ratio, local buckling, deflection, member cross-sectional dimensions and truss height etc. The automated optimum design algorithm of this study is divided into three-level procedures. The first level on member cross-sectional optimization is performed by the sequential unconstrained minimization technique(SUMT) using dynamic programming method. And the second level about truss height optimization is applied for obtaining the optimum truss height by three-equal interval search method. The last level of optimization is applied for obtaining the optimum panel number of truss by integer programming method. The algorithm of multi-level optimization programming technique proposed in this study is more helpful for the economical design of plane trusses as well as space trusses.