An End-to-End Computational Platform to Automate Seismic Design, Nonlinear Analysis, and Loss Assessment of Woodframe Buildings

Abstract

Due to their popularity, especially in residential construction, the seismic performance of woodframe buildings is an integral component of community resilience. To enable a comprehensive assessment that is rooted in the performance-based earthquake engineering framework, an end-to-end framework that automates the seismic design, nonlinear analysis and performance assessment is developed. The framework is formulated as a workflow and materialized into a computational platform using an object-oriented programming paradigm in the Python programming language. The workflow is presented as a ready-to-implement computational platform named “Auto- WoodSDA.” The computational platform is developed to perform three major tasks: 1) generate code-conforming seismic designs of new buildings, 2) create a numerical model and perform nonlinear static and dynamic analyses, and 3) assess economic losses. The automated tool imports user inputs such as basic building information and seismic design parameters on one end and produces risk-informed seismic performance information such as expected annual loss on the other end, thus, effectively creating an “end-to-end” workflow. An example building is used to verify and validate the platform. The results obtained from the example implementation demonstrate the capability of the platform to reliably generate new designs, perform nonlinear analysis, and assess the economic loss of the woodframe buildings.

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Recommended citation: Dahal L, Burton H, Yi Z. An end-to-end computational platform to automate seismic design, nonlinear analysis, and loss assessment of woodframe buildings. Proceedings of the 12th National Conference in Earthquake Engineering, Earthquake Engineering Research Institute, Salt Lake City, UT. 2022.