Bridging Continents in Geotechnics: A Swarm-Intelligence Transferability Index for Raft Foundations on Expansive Soils
Abstract
Abstract Expansive soils undergo cyclical swelling and shrinkage that generate differential uplift pressures on shallow foundations, a problem documented worldwide and particularly severe in India's Black Cotton Soils and the montmorillonite-rich clays of the Peruvian Altiplano. Conventional raft (mat) foundation design on such soils relies on conservative, code-based rules of thumb (IS 2911, ACI 318 − 19, PTI) that frequently produce either costly over-design or under-design manifesting as differential heave and cracking. Over the last decade, swarm-intelligence (SI) metaheuristics — chiefly Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) and Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) — have been applied with documented success to related geotechnical prediction and optimization problems, from undrained shear strength estimation to swelling-pressure prediction and construction-cost optimization. Yet no published framework translates these SI methods into an explicit, code-compatible design and transferability procedure for raft foundations on expansive soils, nor addresses how findings developed under Indian conditions could be adapted to Peru's distinct seismic, climatic and normative context. This paper conducts a PRISMA-informed narrative synthesis of peer-reviewed, DOI-indexed sources on SI applications in geotechnical engineering and expansive-soil foundation design; formulates the governing PSO and ACO equations together with the classical bearing-capacity and swelling-pressure formulas…
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