Concrete compressive strength (CCS) is among the most important mechanical characteristics of this widely used material. This study develops a novel integrative method for efficient prediction of CCS. The suggested method is an artificial neural network (ANN) favorably tuned by electromagnetic field optimization (EFO). The EFO simulates a physics-based strategy, which in this work is employed to find the best contribution of the concrete parameters (i.e., cement (C), blast furnace slag (SBF), fly ash (FA1), water (W), superplasticizer (SP), coarse aggregate (AC), fine aggregate (FA2), and the age of testing (AT)) to the CCS. The same effort is carried out by three benchmark optimizers, namely the water cycle algorithm (WCA), sine cosine algorithm (SCA), and cuttlefish optimization algorithm (CFOA) to be compared with the EFO. The results show that hybridizing the ANN using the mentioned algorithms led to reliable approaches for predicting the CCS. However, comparative analysis indicates that there are appreciable distinctions between the prediction capacity of the ANNs created by the EFO and WCA vs. the SCA and CFOA. For example, the mean absolute error calculated for the testing phase of the ANN-WCA, ANN-SCA, ANN-CFOA, and ANN-EFO was 5.8363, 7.8248, 7.6538, and 5.6236, respectively. Moreover, the EFO was considerably faster than the other strategies. In short, the ANN-EFO is a highly efficient hybrid model, and can be recommended for the early prediction of the CCS. A user-friendly explainable and explicit predictive formula is also derived for the convenient estimation of the CCS.
Keywords: civil engineering; concrete compressive strength; electromagnetic field optimization; metaheuristic strategies.