Generation of spectrum compatible ground motion and its use in regulatory and performance-based seismic analysis

This paper deals with the generation of artificial spectrum compatible ground motion complying with different goals. In particular, three distinct objectives that may emerge in performance-based seismic analysis and design are discussed: Conservative design analysis based on only few spectrum-compatible accelerograms Performance-based earthquake engineering approaches for risk studies, in general less than 30 accelerograms are used. Full "best-estimate" analysis for probabilistic and reliability analysis of structures subject to seismic random excitation. The ground motion time-histories have to be in agreement with these goals. Different methods and ground motion models are available in literature. Vanmarcke was among the first to implement these approaches to be used for engineering design (SIMQKE [9]), later models introduced non stationary features e.g. Preumont [1]. More recently, a module for the generation of artificial ground motion has been introduced in Code Aster [23] that addresses the above objectives. The issues of practical use and code implementation are addressed and some results illustrating the different approaches are presented.