The search for a design that meets both performance and safety, with minimal cost and lesser environmental impact was always the goal of structural engineers. In general, the design of conventional reinforced concrete structures is an iterative process based on rules of thumb established from the personal experience and intuition of the designer. However, such procedure makes the design process exhaustive and only occasionally leads to the best solution. In such context, this work presents the development and implementation of a mathematical formulation for obtaining optimal sections of reinforced concrete columns subjected to uniaxial flexural compression, based on the verification of strength proposed by the Brazilian standard NBR 6118 (ABNT 2007). To minimize the cost of the reinforced concrete columns, the Simulated Annealing optimization method was used, in which the amount and diameters of the reinforcement bars and the dimensions of the columns cross sections were considered as discrete variables. The results obtained were compared to those obtained from the conventional design procedure and other optimization methods, in an attempt to verify the influence of resistance class, variations in the magnitudes of bending moment and axial force, and material costs on the optimal design of reinforced concrete columns subjected to uniaxial flexural compression.