Impact of Component Correlation on Probabilistic Seismic Responses of Steel Frames by Modifying Non-Positive Definite Correlation Matrices

This paper studies the effects of spatial correlation between the structural components on probabilistic seismic performance of steel moment resisting frames, using extended incremental dynamic analysis (IDA) method to consider the effects of aleatoric uncertainties caused by ground motion records. In this probabilistic assessment, a combination of Latin hypercube sampling (LHS) and Cholesky decomposition (CD) methods are utilized to take the epistemic uncertainties of the numerical model into account. In case the target correlation matrix is not positive definite, two powerful optimization algorithms are employed to find the closest positive definite correlation matrix.