MSC is announcing a new business offering based upon a breakthrough technology. MSC has developed a means by which design engineers or occasional CAE software users can reliably perform complex engineering analysis with the same resultant quality as do the dedicated analysis experts. This breakthrough technology captures the expert’s engineering knowledge and specific process solution methodolo...

The Collaboratory for the Study of Earthquake Predictability (CSEP) aims to advance earthquake research by rigorous testing of earthquake forecast hypotheses. As in other disciplines, such hypothesis testing requires carefully designed experiments that meet certain requirements: they should be reproducible, fully transparent, and conducted within a controlled environment. CSEP has begun buildin...

Severe soil liquefaction due to a long duration earthquake with low acceleration occurred at Tokyo Bay area in the 2011 off the Pacific coast of Tohoku Earthquake. This phenomenon clearly shows that soil liquefaction is affected by properties of input waves. This paper describes effect of wave properties of earthquake on liquefaction using effective stress analysis with some earthquakes. Analyt...

In this paper, an optimization framework is developed for performance-based seismic design of composite moment frames consisting of concrete filled steel box columns and I-shaped steel beams. Material cost of the structure and seismic damage under severe earthquake ground motions are minimized as objective functions. Two design examples are presented to demonstrate the applicability and efficie...

The earthquake engineering community recognizes the need to improve current seismic codes and design methods in the light of recent inadequate behavior of building structures. Presently, the performance-based earthquake engineering is being envisioned as the solution to this problem. In this new design approach, the desired behavior of the building is formulated first in the conceptual stage fo...

This paper deals with the optimization of reinforced concrete (RC) structures under earthquake loads by introducing a simple methodology. One of the most important problems in the design of RC structures is the existing of various design scenarios that all of them satisfy design constraints. Despite of the steel structures, a large number of design candidates due to a large number of design var...

The influence of the near-fault ground motion on the response of long-span bridges must be considered as a critical factor for seismic design because the response indicates different aspects from existing earthquake characteristics. Also, it is important to note that the safety index for the risk assessment of long-span bridges is determined based on the minimum expected lifecycle cost E(LCC). ...

Composite RCS building frames integrate reinforced concrete columns with structural steel beams to provide an efficient solution for the design and construction of earthquake-resisting structures. In this paper, an optimization framework is developed for performance-based seismic design of planar RCS moment resisting frames. The objective functions are defined as minimizing the construction cos...

This is the second of a two-part paper introducing a risk-based global coordination system in a distributed environment for collaborative design. Part I represents the basic concepts and a theoretical framework, and this paper describes a practical application in a National Science Foundation/George E. Brown, Jr Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation. Core concepts, theoretical framework...