Multicriteria Decision-Making Methods in Selecting Seismic Upgrading Strategy of High-Rise RC Wall Buildings

Reinforced concrete (RC) structural walls are widely used in high-rise structures in earthquake-prone areas. Damaged by the earthquakes in the past decades, these buildings need retrofitting in order to increase the resilience of buildings with concrete shear walls. This study aimed to investigate the retrofitting of high-rise RC wall buildings using energy dissipation devices. To this end, a total of four buildings with 15, 20, 25, and 30 stories equipped with concrete shear walls as their lateral load-resisting system were retrofitted using passive seismic control systems. The buildings were subjected to the set of the far-field and near-field records presented in the FEMA standard (P-695), and an index was defined to relate the structural responses of the building, such as drift, acceleration, velocity, displacement, and base shear, to the earthquake records. For this purpose, numerical models, which have been validated with the experimental results, have been performed. The resulting index values were considered as the criteria, and the passive systems were ranked by the efficient Multicriteria Decision Making (MCDM) method. Based on the results from the MCDM method and using the considered criteria, friction damper was ranked first among the available energy dissipation devices for high-rise RC wall buildings.