PRODUCTION OF ENDURANCE TIME EXCITATION FUNCTIONS: THE CMA EVOLUTION STRATEGY APPROACH

Abstract

Endurance Time (ET) method is a recently developed response-history based analysisprocedure for seismic assessment and structural design in which structures are subjected to apredesigned intensifying excitation function, and their performance is evaluated based on theirresponse at different excitation levels. Generating efficient excitation functions, which is essentialfor functionality of the method, leads to a complex large-scale optimization problem. In this paper,the Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolution Strategy (CMA-ES), which has found manyapplications in solving continuous optimization problems, is employed to produce the excitationfunctions. The results reveal the good performance of the algorithm in generating ET excitationfunctions (ETEF) with reasonable accuracy and time efficiency.