Seismic performance of post-and-beam timber buildings II: reliability evaluations

This paper presents an approach to evaluate the performance reliability of post-and-beam timber buildings under seismic excitation. The uncertainties considered include those associated with the earthquake ground motions, the structural mass and shear wall characteristics. The approach uses a verified structural model called “PB3D” for the creation of a database of seismic responses, which are then represented by appropriate response surfaces. These, in turn, are used to formulate explicit performance functions for the reliability analysis. Performance is studied in terms of peak inter-story drift, and polynomial functions are used to represent the seismic response surfaces. Non-performance probabilities are evaluated with respect to different performance expectations, using FORM and importance sampling methods. Case studies for two multi-story post-and-beam buildings are also presented.