EVALUATION OF EFFECTIVE PARAMETERS ON WAVE DIFFRACTION OF FAR-FAULT GROUND MOTIONS USING ARTIFICIAL NEURAL NETWORKS

Local site conditions have a great eect on ground motion and, consequently, underground structures, as important lifelines, have a vital in uence on disaster management after earthquake occurrence. Among the local site topographies of interest are tunnels, which are located underground. A tunnel is an underground passageway, completely enclosed except for openings for the entrance and exit, commonly at each end. A tunnel may be for pedestrian or vehicular road trac, for rail traf- c, or for canals. Some tunnels are aqueducts to supply water, for consumption or for hydroelectric stations, or are sewers. Upon impact with a tunnel, induced earthquake motion would generate diraction waves, which increase the damage in adjacent structures. In order to investigate the eect of wave diraction on near fault ground motions, the twin tunnels of the Shiraz subway and their adjacent structures have been studied in the present article. Articial neural networks (ANNs) are a eld of science aimed at mimicking natural learning using mathematically based approximation. A single biological neuron is composed of three major parts: the cell body, the axon, and the dendrite. With known combinations of input and output data, a neural network can be trained to extract the underlying characteristics and relationships from the data. Then, when a separate set of input data is fed to the trained network, it will produce an approximate but reasonable output. Neural networks are highly nonlinear and can capture complex interactions among input/output variables in a system without any prior knowledge about the nature of these interactions. In this study, an appropriate articial neural network has been generated in order to estimate the amount of diraction of near fault earthquake waves. The results show that an idealized neural network has a high level of precision in comparison with results derived from nite element analysis. Finally, a sensitivity analysis was performed on input parameters and their percent of importance was evaluated.