| Although energy dissipation devices (EDDs) have been used as a viable strategy of seismic protection of buildings for many years, current design codes do not provide guidelines for optimizing EDD configurations that may improve the structure's performance or decrease the cost. In this research, we developed an effective and efficient design methodology to optimize the EDD configuration based on building performance objectives. The new performance-based heuristic approach uniquely combines the engineering knowledge and the iterative approach to optimize the EDD configuration for optimal structural performance under earthquake conditions. The iterations are guided by a modal analysis-based engineering heuristic to navigate the large solution space for efficient solutions. This strategy is capable of minimizing different performance indices of responses, such as inter-story drift, roof displacement, acceleration, or base shear. The comparison results with the evolutionary and the heuristic approaches show that the proposed approach can effectively address different performance indices, and can efficiently provide the optimal EDD configuration. In addition to the proposed optimization approach and procedure, we developed a dynamic analysis technique for approximating responses of linear dynamic systems in the optimization process. Numerical example shows that the proposed analysis technique can be used as an efficient way to evaluate the performance of structures with added linear dampers. Furthermore, we designed an object-oriented software framework as architecture for different structural engineering research applications. The implementation for the optimization research shows that the framework can be customized and the code reusability can be achieved. |
