Retrofit of Steel Buildings against Progressive Collapse Using Cables

In this work, different cable configurations are employed in order to retrofit seismically designed steel buildings against progressive collapse. Four manually defined cable configurations are proposed. The effectiveness of the assessed configurations is evaluated against that of an optimized design. An optimized design is the one which meets all applicable requirements and has the smallest cost at the same time, i.e. the design which achieves the optimum use of the materials. The “Evolution Strategies” optimization algorithm is selected for the determination of the optimum retrofit approach in each damage scenario considered. The results yielded are indicative of the effectiveness of each retrofit approach.