Genetic Optimization for Seismic Retrofit of Soft-Story Woodframe Buildings Using FEMA P-807 Methodology
Publication: Journal of Performance of Constructed Facilities
Volume 29, Issue 6
Abstract
Recent earthquakes around the world are reminders of the destructiveness of earthquakes and the effect they exact on lives and property. In 1989, the Loma Prieta earthquake resulted in significant damage and fatalities in the San Francisco Bay Area. Multiunit woodframe buildings suffered severe damage as a result of moderate to strong ground motions. Just 5 years later in southern California, the Northridge earthquake caused even more extensive damage to soft-story woodframe buildings. These multifamily residential buildings have upper stories with dense walls but have a large amount of openings for automobile parking at ground level, making them soft (and weak) story buildings. These buildings pose very significant safety risks to tenants, financial risks to owners, and recovery risks to all levels of government. They have been recognized as a disaster preparedness problem, and mitigation efforts are underway in San Francisco with other California cities beginning to follow. In May 2009, FEMA and the Applied Technology Council launched a project to develop a logical methodology for seismic retrofit of (soft-story) weak-story woodframe buildings in seismically active regions of the United States which resulted in the FEMA P-807 report. The objective of the study presented in this paper was to develop a method to optimize retrofit designs for soft-story woodframe buildings based on the FEMA P-807 guideline. Various constraints and objective functions were applied within a genetic algorithm to identify optimal retrofit designs within two building examples.
Get full access to this article
View all available purchase options and get full access to this article.
Acknowledgments
The second author acknowledges the George T. Abell funds at Colorado State University. The authors also acknowledge David Mar and Mike Korolyk of TippingMar for their invaluable comments on the FEMA P-807 methodology and Pouria Bahmani for providing information on the two example buildings during this study. Additionally, this material is based on work supported by the National Science Foundation Grants No. CMMI-1041631 and CMMI-1314957. Thank you to all NEES-Soft Co-PIs, senior personal, and collaborators.
References
AISC. (2011). Steel construction manual, Chicago, 1-1–1-112.
Arora, J. (2004). Introduction to optimum design, Academic Press, Waltham, MA, 41–45.
ASCE. (2010). “Seismic rehabilitation of buildings.” ASCE 41-06, Reston, VA.
Ellingwood, B. R., Rosowsky, D. V., Li, Y., and Kim, J. (2004). “Fragility assessment of light-frame wood construction subjected to wind and earthquake hazards.” J. Struct. Eng., 1921–1930.
FEMA. (2009). “Quantification of building seismic performance factors.”, Washington, DC.
FEMA. (2012). “Seismic evaluation and retrofit of multi-unit wood-frame buildings with weak first stories.”, Washington, DC.
Goldberg, D. E. (1983). “Computer-aided gas pipeline operation using genetic algorithms and rule learning.” Ph.D. thesis, Univ. of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, 1–454.
Goldberg, D. E. (1989). Genetic algorithms in search, optimization, and machine learning, Addison-Wesley, Boston, 1–215.
Hajela, P., and Lee, E. (1995). “Genetic algorithms in truss topological optimization.” Int. J. Solids Struct., 32(22), 3341–3357.
Holland, J. H. (1975). Adaptation in natural and artificial systems: An introductory analysis with applications to biology, control, and artificial intelligence, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, MI, 1–227.
Park, S., and van de Lindt, J. W. (2009). “Formulation of seismic fragilities for a wood-frame building based on visually determined damage indexes.” J. Perform. Constr. Facil., 346–352.
Park, S., van de Lindt, J. W., Gupta, R., and Cox, D. (2012). “Method to determine the locations of tsunami vertical evacuation shelters.” Nat. Hazard., 63(2), 891–908.
Rajeev, S., and Krishnamoorthy, C. S. (1992). “Discrete optimization of structures using genetic algorithms.” J. Struct. Eng., 1233–1250.
Silva, P., and Badie, S. S. (2008). “Optimum beam-to-column stiffness ratio of portal frames under lateral loads.” Struct. Mag, in press.
van de Lindt, J. W., et al. (2013). “Performance-based seismic retrofit of soft-story light-frame wood buildings.” 10th Int. Conf. on Urban Earthquake Engineering, Tokyo Tech Univ., Tokyo, Japan.
Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Copyright
© 2014 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Jan 27, 2014
Accepted: Jun 3, 2014
Published online: Sep 19, 2014
Discussion open until: Feb 19, 2015
Published in print: Dec 1, 2015
Authors
Metrics & Citations
Metrics
Citations
Download citation
If you have the appropriate software installed, you can download article citation data to the citation manager of your choice. Simply select your manager software from the list below and click Download.