Artificial intelligence-enhanced seismic response prediction of reinforced concrete frames

Abstract

Existing physics-based modeling approaches do not have a good compromise between performance and computational efficiency in predicting the seismic response of reinforced concrete (RC) frames, where high-fidelity models (e.g., fiber-based modeling method) have reasonable predictive performance but are computationally demanding, while more simplified models (e.g., shear building model) are the opposite. This paper proposes a novel artificial intelligence (AI)-enhanced computational method for seismic response prediction of RC frames which can remedy these problems. The proposed AI-enhanced method incorporates an AI technique with a shear building model, where the AI technique can directly utilize the real-world experimental data of RC columns to determine the lateral stiffness of each column in the target RC frame while the structural stiffness matrix is efficiently formulated via the shear building model. Therefore, this scheme can enhance prediction accuracy due to the use of real-world data while maintaining high computational efficiency due to the incorporation of the shear building model. Two data-driven seismic response solvers are developed to implement the proposed approach based on a database including 272 RC column specimens. Numerical results demonstrate that compared to the experimental data, the proposed method outperforms the fiber-based modeling approach in both prediction capability and computational efficiency and is a promising tool for accurate and efficient seismic response prediction of structural systems.