Estimation of Fundamental Time Period of Soft Storey Buildings Using Artificial Intelligence

Fundamental time period of buildings is a critical parameter which influences design of the buildings. The past earthquake records show that soft storey buildings have experienced major failures. However, seismic design codes have ignored this aspect in proposing equations to estimate fundamental time period. Moreover, expressions proposed by codes are based on limited dataset which is location specific. This raises a question on universal applicability of code equations. The present study focuses on determining the effects of parameters like building height, bay width, shear walls has been studied using a detailed sensitivity analysis at first. To achieve this purpose 230 building models with soft storeys at different locations have been modeled and analyzed by E-Tabs software. The analysis results have been tabulated to create a response databank. Furthermore, ANN tool and non-linear regression analysis has been used on this databank to propose generalized equations to estimate the fundamental time period. The proposed equations have been validated for building models with different storey heights than those adopted for analytical study to determine the applicability range of the proposed equations.