Date/Time
Date(s) - 12/12/2019
3:30 PM - 4:30 PM
Location
365C Weil Hall - ESSIE Conference Room
Categories
A System-Level Approach to Performance-Based Design and Optimization of Structures: The Case of Wind-Excited Building Systems
The huge economic losses and social impacts seen in the aftermath of hurricanes have triggered significant interest in enhancing structural design for mitigating wind-induced risk. To achieve the desired high-performance goals at affordable costs, new design methods are needed that can simultaneously search for a minimal-investment design and restrict potential failure and loss. A rational approach is to integrate the concepts of structural optimization with state-of-the-art performance-based wind engineering frameworks that enable an explicit propagation of uncertainty through the computational models in estimating performance. While performance-based design optimization (PBDO) is a very powerful concept, a major challenge to its implementation in practice is the high computational demand associated with running stochastic simulations within the optimization loop. This seminar focuses on an efficient PBDO approach that can be applied to large-scale uncertain systems that are excited by stochastic wind loads and subject to system-level probabilistic performance constraints. The proposed PBDO framework can not only identify optimal designs that ensure system-level performance targets, but also utilize general damage and loss models that are related to meaningful performance metrics such as monetary loss and repair time. Examples of applications ranging from design to topology optimization are illustrated. Last but not least, an extension to a multicriteria setting is presented that provides decision-makers with a set of candidate designs, as well as insightful trade-off information concerning initial investment and anticipated losses due to damage induced by severe wind events.