GENES, GENETIC GENERATOR OF SIGNALS: A SYNTHETIC ACCELEROGRAMS APPLICATION

This paper presents a new approach for the generation of earthquake ground motions that match a given site-specific design spectrum with minimum alteration. GENES permits to apply seismic and soil parameters for a realistic estimation of ground motions. Contrary to the prevailing construction methods, the proposed methodology is capable of selecting a set of records that can be considered good parents and of modifying their accelerations components for the generation of new optimal signals. GENES captures of the evolutionary and localized features of the soil/rock-systems nonlinear response when they are subjected to nonstationary inputs (seismic loads). This task is achieved by using a genetic algorithm GA which through a processes that mimic mating, natural selection, and mutation, is capable of generating successful individuals (acceleration time histories). The GENES procedure is fast and reliable and the results indicate that genuine ground motions (adequate temporal evolution of their frequency content and reasonable predefined image of the expected earthquake) can be obtained although the type of target spectrum.