Optimization of the seismic performance of masonry infilled R/C buildings at the stage of design using artificial neural networks

The construction of Reinforced Concrete (R/C) buildings with unreinforced masonry infills is part of the traditional building practice in many countries with regions of high seismicity throughout the world. When these buildings are subjected to seismic motions the presence of masonry infills and especially their configuration can highly influence the seismic damage state. The capability to avoid configurations of masonry infills prone to seismic damage at the stage of initial architectural concept would be significantly definitive in the context of Performance-Based Earthquake Engineering. Along these lines, the present paper investigates the potential of instant prediction of the damage response of R/C buildings with various configurations of masonry infills utilizing Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs). To this end, Multilayer Feedforward Perceptron networks are utilized and the problem is formulated as pattern recognition problem. The ANNs' training data-set is created by means of Nonlinear Time History Analyses of 5 R/C buildings with a large number of different masonry infills' distributions, which are subjected to 65 earthquakes. The structural damage is expressed in terms of the Maximum Interstorey Drift Ratio. The most significant conclusion which is extracted is that the ANNs can reliably estimate the influence of masonry infills' configurations on the seismic damage level of R/C buildings incorporating their optimum design.