A practical framework for incorporating local shear stiffness in the analysis of multi-story buildings subjected to lateral loads

Local shear deformation in structural systems—such as frames and coupled shear walls—has been largely omitted from the classical sandwich-beam formulation, despite its extensive application in the continuous modeling of multi-story buildings. Although several recent studies have attempted to incorporate this mechanism, most available solutions are mathematically complex, limited to specific configurations, and substantially alter the classical model. To overcome these limitations, this study introduces a simple correction factor that incorporates local shear deformation without modifying the classical sandwich-beam formulation, thereby preserving its closed-form analytical advantages. The lateral displacement is decomposed into bending, shear, and interaction components. It is shown that the local shear mechanism does not modify the bending or interaction contributions, allowing existing closed-form expressions to remain valid. However, the global shear displacement requires adjustment through the proposed correction factor, which effectively addresses the large errors documented in previous works. The resulting formulation shows strong agreement with analytical solutions available in the literature and is applicable to both symmetric and asymmetric buildings.