PRODUCTION OF ENDURANCE TIME EXCITATION FUNCTIONS: THE CMA EVOLUTION STRATEGY APPROACH

Endurance Time (ET) method is a recently developed response-history based analysis procedure for seismic assessment and structural design in which structures are subjected to a predesigned intensifying excitation function, and their performance is evaluated based on their response at different excitation levels. Generating efficient excitation functions, which is essential for functionality of the method, leads to a complex large-scale optimization problem. In this paper, the Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolution Strategy (CMA-ES), which has found many applications in solving continuous optimization problems, is employed to produce the excitation functions. The results reveal the good performance of the algorithm in generating ET excitation functions (ETEF) with reasonable accuracy and time efficiency.