Proschema: A Matlab application for processing strong motion records and estimating earthquake engineering parameters

Strong motion records are the original input data for earthquake engineering studies and earthquake resistant building codes. Records originating from both, analogue and modern digital instruments should be subjected to processing in order to derive credible engineering parameters, such as spectral ordinates. A number of processing procedures have been proposed by many researchers through the past few decades; the goal, however, is always the same, identification and removal of noise and performing necessary adjustments related to the operating instrument or the record’s quality. A careful inspection of previous processing schemes and the design of several development tests related to major processing steps proved to be helpful in determining the necessary features that the presented software should include. These have been incorporated in a Matlab application in order to produce a reliable and user-friendly interface giving the researcher several options on major processing steps. It is noteworthy that this computer program can be used either as an interactive process tool when individual record processing corresponds to the researcher’s needs or, for processing a vast number of records without user supervision and even through a scheduled task.