Simplified Performance Based Earthquake Engineering

This study proposes a simplified approach towards Performance-Based Earthquake Engineering (PBEE) and is limited to Performance-Based Design (PBD) and Performance-Based Assessment (PBA). The proposed simple PBD procedure incorporates three domains: Hazard Domain, Structural System Domain, and Loss Domain in which the focus is on the mean values of the ground motion intensity, building response, and losses. This simple PBD procedure helps engineers make decisions on global structural parameters and the choice of an effective structural system and material based on several performance targets that are defined upfront. This conceptual design should be followed by a detailed performance assessment phase in which the building performance is evaluated considering all sources of uncertainty and final design decisions are made.

The ease of the simple PBD approach and its semi-graphical presentation (denoted as Design Decision Support System, DDSS) will provide engineers with an insight about the contribution of different building subsystems to the building total loss. A byproduct of this simple PBD process is that it can be used as simple PBA process by only changing the flow of information from ground motion hazard to loss estimation. Special consideration is given to design for collapse prevention. We show a simple way for incorporating different sources of uncertainty (aleatory and epistemic) in the proposed simple PBD approach for collapse prevention. The effectiveness of the proposed PBD and PBA process is illustrated through a simple example.

The DDSS proposed in this study is supported with a database of structural response parameters obtained for a wide-range of combination in structural parameters of frame and wall structural systems. This research suggests a new way for describing structural component parameters by which the component backbone curve and cyclic deterioration parameter are defined based on the inelastic characteristics of the component. Using the aforementioned database of structural response parameters, sensitivity of several building response parameters to variations of structural properties was studied. Closed-form equations for addressing the collapse potential of a building based on corresponding structural parameters were developed that may assist the proposed simplified PBEE.