Tectonic hazards/Seismic performance analysis

Seismic performance analysis is an intellectual tool of earthquake engineering which breaks the complex topic into smaller parts to gain a better understanding of seismic performance of building and non-building structures. The technique as a formal concept is a relatively recent development. In general, seismic analysis is based on the methods of structural dynamics. For decades, the most prominent instrument of seismic analysis has been the earthquake response spectrum method which, also, contributed to the proposed building code's concept of today.

However, those response spectra are good, mostly, for single-degree-of-freedom structural systems. Numerical step-by-step integration, applied with the charts of seismic performance, proved to be a more effective method of performance analysis for the multi-degree-of-freedom structural systems with severe non-linearity and under a substantially transient process of earthquake type kinematic excitation or earthquake simulation.