Seismic assessment of school buildings in Taiwan using the evolutionary support vector machine inference system

Elementary and junior high school buildings in Taiwan are designed to serve not only as places of education but also as temporary shelters in the aftermath of major earthquakes. Effective evaluation of the seismic resistance of school buildings is a critical issue that deserves further investigation. The National Center for Research on Earthquake Engineering (in Taiwan) currently employs performance-target ground acceleration (A(p)) as the index to evaluate school structure compliance with seismic resistance requirements. However, computational processes are complicated, time consuming, and require the input of many experts. To address this problem, this paper developed an evolutionary support vector machine inference system (ESIS) that integrated two AI techniques, namely, the support vector machine (SVM) and fast messy genetic algorithm (fmGA). Based on training results, the developed system can predict the A(p) of a school building in a significantly shorter time base, thus increasing evaluation efficiency significantly. The validity of ESIS was tested using the 10-Fold Cross-Validation method. Another aim of this paper is to retain and apply expert knowledge and relevant experience to the solution of similar problems in the future. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.