Abstract:
Selection of appropriate ground motion (GM) records for nonlinear dynamic analysis (NDA) of structures plays a crucial role to estimate structural responses reasonably. In this study, a multi-functional solution model utilizing stochastic harmony search (HS) algorithm is proposed to obtain scaled or unscaled real GM component sets for uni-directional analysis of two-dimensional structural models and GM component pair sets for bi-directional analysis of three-dimensional structural models. The solution model allows to consider compatibility between target spectrum and both mean spectrum and individual spectra besides desired spectral variability. Uniform hazard spectrum, conditional mean spectrum or scenario-based spectrum can be selected as target spectrum. Combined response spectra of selected component pairs such as SRSS, geometric mean and maximum directional can also be handled by the solution model. To demonstrate the efficiency of the solution model, various examples were presented. In addition, a sensitivity analysis was performed to evaluate the effect of HS parameters on the solution accuracy. Results show that the proposed solution model can be regarded as efficient to obtain appropriate GM record sets to be used for NDAs within a probabilistic seismic design and/or performance assessment framework. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V.