Soft Computing in Earthquake Engineering: a Short Overview

Soft Computing refers to the name for solving the hardest problems with which human are confronted today that tolerates the imprecision, uncertainty, partial truth, and approximation of the solutions. Nature inspired algorithms, like evolutionary algorithms, swarm intelligence, and neural networks become one of the leading methods for solving these problems. The soft computing methods have also been applied for solving the earthquake engineering problems. In this paper, a short review of these methods is presented. In line with this, the problems solved by soft computing algorithms are identified, then, the characteristics of these algorithms are exposed and finally, the applications of the soft computing algorithms are identified. The paper concludes with an overview of the possible directions for further development.