Keywords: performance-based design, prescriptive design procedures, behaviour factor, life-cycle cost analysis, reinforced concrete buildings, structural optimization, pushover analysis.

The basic objective of this chapter is the assessment of the European seismic design codes and in particular of EC8 and EAK2000 with respect to the recommended behaviour factor q using as an assessment tool the life cycle cost analysis. The assessment of the Eurocodes is performed in two stages using two test cases: (i) through the comparison of designs with different values of q, (ii) through the comparison of designs based on Eurocodes and a performance based design methodology. The assessment is performed on two reinforced concrete buildings, a one-storey building and a multi-storey building, having symmetrical and non-symmetrical plan views respectively. The first building was designed for the value of the behaviour factor q equal to 3.5 either to meet the provisions of the Greek seismic design code or based on a performance-based design procedure. The second building was optimally designed under four different values of the behaviour factor. In both test cases as a comparison measure the values of the life cycle and total cost of each design were used. Life-cycle cost analysis, in conjunction with structural optimization, is believed to be a reliable procedure for assessing the performance of structures during their life time designed for different behaviour factors.

The most important findings of this study were threefold: (i) The initial cost for a reinforced concrete (RC) structure, designed to permit elastic behaviour for the response spectrum of the EC2 and Greek national seismic code, is not prohibitive. (ii) The differences of the total life-cycle cost for different q values may be substantially greater than those observed for the initial construction cost. (iii) A RC structure based on the proposed performance-based design procedure leads to economical designs with respect to the total cost compared to a code conforming design.

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