Model Type Effects on the Estimated Seismic Response of a 20-Story Steel Moment Resisting Frame

Finite-element models of varying sophistication may be employed to determine a building's seismic response with increasing complexity, potentially offering a higher fidelity at the cost of the computational load. To account for this effect on the reliability of performance assessment, model-type uncertainty needs to be incorporated as distinct to the uncertainty related to a given model's parameters. At present, only placeholder values are available in seismic guidelines. Instead, we attempt to quantify them accurately for a modern 20-story steel moment-resisting frame. Different types of three-dimensional (3D), two-dimensional (2D) multibay, and 2D single-bay multidegree-of-freedom models are investigated, together with their equivalent single-degree-of-freedom ones, to evaluate the model dependency of the response both within each broad model category, as well as among different categories. In conclusion, ensemble values are recommended for the uncertainty in each model category showing that for the perfectly-symmetric perimeter-frame P-Δ sensitive building under investigation, the uncertainty stemming from 3D versus 2D or distributed versus lumped plasticity models is lower than the governing record-to-record variability.