Sparse Uniform Traversal of Model Parameter Space for Estimating the Nonlinear Displacement Response of Instrumented Buildings to Earthquakes

ABSTRACT The displacement response of a building structure to earthquake excitations is crucial for assessing its seismic damage, which is usually accompanied by structural nonlinear behavior. This study proposes an efficient method of quickly estimating the nonlinear displacement responses of seismically damaged buildings. By designing a set of sparsely and uniformly distributed samples in the multi‐dimensional parameter space, this method traverses all these samples to find the best set of parameters for a parametric numerical model of the building that minimizes the error between the simulated and the measured responses. Compared to existing model‐driven methods, the proposed method can efficiently match the high‐dimensional parameters of the assumed parametric model without tedious and less robust iterative optimization, even if the instrumented building sustains severe seismic damage and deviates significantly from its initial state. The shaking table test data of a full‐scale four‐story reinforced concrete moment‐resisting frame structure is used to justify the advantage of the method over the state‐of‐the‐art optimization‐based model‐driven method. The proposed method successfully estimated the structural responses of all the stories of the building with an average error of 4.6% for the maximum inter‐story drift across the five earthquake loading runs. It took only approximately 19 min to complete the calculation on a personal computer, which could be greatly accelerated given more computation cores because the traversal is inherently friendly to parallel computation.