Advanced Steel Construction

Vol. 22, No. 4, pp. 418-431 (2026)


 MOMENT CAPACITY PREDICTION OF HIGH STRENGTH

STEEL (HSS)-ECC COMPOSITE BEAMS USING

MACHINE LEARNING MODELS

 

Cong-Luyen Nguyen * and Binh-Nam Nguyen

The University of Danang - University of Science and Technology, Danang, Vietnam

*(Corresponding author: E-mail:This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.)

Received: 5 January 2026; Revised: 16 February 2026; Accepted: 13 March 2026

 

DOI:10.18057/IJASC.2026.22.4.6

 

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ABSTRACT

The demand for high-performance structures has led to the development of composite beams made of High Strength Steel (HSS) I-section and Engineered Cementitious Composites (ECC) slab connected through headed shear studs, which could enhance both ductility and flexural capacity compared to conventional counterpart. Accurate prediction of flexural strength in HSS-ECC composite beams is crucial for optimal design and safety. This study presents a machine learning approach, including five machine learning (ML) models (i.e., Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost), Artificial Neural Network (ANN), Support Vector Regression (SVR), Categorical Boosting (CatBoost), and Random Forest (RF)) to predict the flexural capacity of HSS-ECC composite beams. A total of 135 composite beam data were compiled and utilized for training and validating the machine learning models. By using performance metrics, it is indicate that all of the employed ML models showed excellent predicted performance, among which the SVR model exhibits superior predictive accuracy by achieving the lowest prediction errors (MAE, MAPE, and RMSE) together with the highest coefficient of determination (R² = 0.99), indicating superior generalization ability. This offers a viable alternative to traditional analytical approaches for predicting structural engineering.

 

KEYWORDS

HSS-ECC composite beams, Moment capacity, Machine learning, Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost), Artificial Neural Network (ANN), Support Vector Regression (SVR)


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