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The present work is aimed at assessing the impact of strong column-weak beam (SCWB) criterion on seismic performance of optimally designed steel moment frames. To this end, different SCWB ratios are considered for steel special moment resisting frame (SMRF) structures and performance-based design optimization process is implemented with the aid of an efficient metaheuristic. The seismic collapse performance of the optimally designed SMRFs is assessed by performing incremental dynamic analysis (IDA) and determining their adjusted collapse margin ratios. Three design examples of 5-, 10-, and 15-story SMRFs are presented to illustrate the efficiency of the proposed methodology.

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The purpose of the current study is to design steel moment resisting frames for optimal weight in the context of performance-based design. The performance-based design optimization of steel moment frames is a highly nonlinear and complex optimization problem having many local optima. Therefore, an efficient algorithm should be used to deal with this class of structural optimization problems. In the present study, a modified Newton metaheuristic algorithm (MNMA) is proposed for the solution of the optimization problem. In fact, MNMA is the improved version of the original Newton metaheuristic algorithm (NMA), which is a multi-stage optimization technique in which an initial population is generated at each stage based on the results of the previous stages. Two illustrative examples of 5-, and 10-story steel moment frames are presented and a number of independent optimization runs are achieved by NMA and MNMA. The numerical results demonstrate the better performance of the proposed MNMA compared to the NMA in solving the performance-based optimization problem of steel moment frames.