Optimal selecting and scaling the earthquake accelerograms according to Eurocode 8 using ranked particles optimisation

In the present study, we aimed at selecting and scaling accelerograms using metaheuristic algorithms. Selecting and scaling accelerograms is an important step in nonlinear structural analysis. Usually, the accelerograms are selected from the same soil type and they are multiplied to one scaling factor to move its response spectrum above the standard design spectra. In this research, we modified the previous formulation and used ranked particles optimisation (RPO) to optimise the process of selecting and scaling. The records were selected from the database including 380 earthquake records from Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center (PEER). This database contains most of strong earthquakes occurred all over the world. For each soil type of Eurocode 8, accelerograms were selected from the same soil type and from the whole database. The results show that regardless of soil types, when the accelerograms are selected from the whole database, the cost function has smaller value. The same methodology can ...