A Toolbox and Web Application for the Seismic Performance Assessment of Buildings

Abstract

A software tool, known as a PBEE toolbox, for the seismic performance assessment of buildings, which was developed in Matlab in conjunction with the software framework OpenSees, and a web application for the prediction of approximate IDA curves are presented in this chapter. Although, in its present version, the PBEE toolbox supports only simple nonlinear models, its capabilities exceed usual software tools for computational simulation, since it enables seismic performance assessment of buildings with various procedures and adopts an open-source philosophy so that it can be easily extended or modified to suit specific user requirements. The capabilities of the PBEE toolbox and the web application, which involves the response database of a single-degree-of-freedom system with a quadrilateral force-displacement relationship, are demonstrated by means of an assessment of the seismic response parameters of an eight-storey reinforced concrete frame, using incremental dynamic analysis, progressive incremental dynamic analysis, approximate incremental dynamic analysis, and the N2 method. It is shown that, for the case of the presented example, all the methods produce similar results, although each method has some advantages and some disadvantages.