Heuristic approaches to performance-based design of steel frames with standard sections

Heuristic approaches are proposed for performance-based seismic design of steel moment-resisting frames. The total structural volume and the plastic dissipated energy against severe seismic motions are considered as performance measures. The responses at the collapse state is evaluated by time-history analysis against recorded ground motion that are scaled to various velocity levels. Frame members are chosen from the lists of available standard sections. Simulated Annealing (SA) and Tabu Search (TS), which are categorized as single-point search heuristics, are applied to multiobjective optimization problem of steel frames design. It is shown in the numerical examples that Pareto optimal solutions with good accuracy and diversity can be found by SA and TS.