Copyright © 2012 Edén Bojórquez et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

Several studies have been oriented to develop methodologies for estimating inelastic response of structures; however, the estimation of inelastic seismic response spectra requires complex analyses, in such a way that traditional methods can hardly get an acceptable error. In this paper, an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) model is presented as an alternative to estimate inelastic response spectra for earthquake ground motion records. The moment magnitude (), fault mechanism (), Joyner-Boore distance (), shear-wave velocity (), fundamental period of the structure (), and the maximum ductility () were selected as inputs of the ANN model. Fifty earthquake ground motions taken from the NGA database and recorded at sites with different types of soils are used during the training phase of the Feedforward Multilayer Perceptron model. The Backpropagation algorithm was selected to train the network. The ANN results present an acceptable concordance with the real seismic response spectra preserving the spectral shape between the actual and the estimated spectra.