Steel reinforcement (also referred to as rebar) design plays an important role in reinforced concrete (RC) structures in terms of strength requirements, cost and buildability. Currently, rebar design is performed at the individual member level with few considerations of the interference between different intersecting members, leading to potential clashes and buildability issues. Design for Manufacture and Assembly (DfMA) is a cutting-edge technology concept that improves the design for higher buildability by incorporating knowledge from downstream manufacture and assembly activities into the early design phase. This paper presents an innovative DfMA-oriented approach for rebar design optimization with Building Information Modeling (BIM) and a hybrid metaheuristic algorithm. Firstly, activities related to the manufacture and assembly of rebar are identified to apply DfMA principles, followed by the proposed BIM-based optimization framework. Secondly, multi-objective cost design formulation including both the material cost and the installation cost is proposed, incorporating the design code requirements and DfMA considerations. Following this, key modules for implementation are presented including the rebar layout searching, the hybrid genetic algorithm incorporated with Hooke and Jeeves’s method for optimization and rebar clash avoidance. The illustrative example shows that the proposed approach can generate a series of practical rebar layouts, and a trade-off between the material cost and installation cost is found, which means excessive emphasis on minimizing one of them will lead to the rise of the other.

钢筋（也称为钢筋）设计在钢筋混凝土 (RC) 结构中在强度要求、成本和可建造性方面起着重要作用。目前，钢筋设计是在单个构件级别执行的，很少考虑不同交叉构件之间的干扰，从而导致潜在的冲突和可建造性问题。制造和装配设计 (DfMA) 是一种尖端技术概念，它通过将下游制造和装配活动的知识融入早期设计阶段来改进设计，以实现更高的可建造性。本文提出了一种创新的面向 DfMA 的方法，用于通过建筑信息模型 (BIM) 和混合元启发式算法优化钢筋设计。首先，确定与钢筋制造和组装相关的活动应用 DfMA 原则，然后是提议的基于 BIM 的优化框架。其次，结合设计规范要求和 DfMA 考虑，提出了包括材料成本和安装成本在内的多目标成本设计公式。在此之后，介绍了实现的关键模块，包括钢筋布局搜索、与 Hooke 和 Jeeves 的优化方法相结合的混合遗传算法以及钢筋冲突避免。说明性示例表明，所提出的方法可以生成一系列实用的钢筋布局，并且找到了材料成本和安装成本之间的权衡，这意味着过分强调最小化其中一个将导致另一个的上升。