The “Unique Suite” feature enables users to generate multiple unique suites that limit the number of repeated record(s) in different suites depending on a user input.

In general, the GM Suite Selection tool will return multiple ground motion suite solutions, and the user can inspect the different suites and select the best one based on the overall properties of the suite and the user preferences. However, in some cases, some or all of the suites may end up being very similar, which does not provide enough choices for the user to choose from. This can happen due to optimization, which when applied to all the suites might result in the suites approaching the optimal solution and becoming very similar.

The user now can generates multiple suites having different records, in which all, none or multiple records are allowed to be duplicates. If all records were selected to be unique, then no record will be repeated in more than one suite.

This feature ensures that when the user requests multiple suite solutions (by default 8 suites are returned), those suites are sufficiently different from each other, and do not merely repeat the same records, which might happen when the optimization process results in all suites being similar. The selection algorithm can now be configured to preserve variety in the returned solutions by ensuring that every returned suite is sufficiently different from all others, to the degree desired by the user.

The figures below illustrate an example of the unique suite feature. If a user requests 7 records per suite and a minimum of 4 unique records per suite, then 4 records out of 7 will be different in each suite and up to three may be common/repeated between the two suites as shown in the figures. The first figure shows an example where two suites each have 2 shared and 5 unique records (meeting/exceeding the minimum requirement of 4 unique records per suite). The second Figure shows the number of unique records across 3 suites to be 4 unique records per suite. The same concept may be applied up to the number of requested suites (e.g. 8 suites).

Figure: Example of two suites selected based on user selection of a minimum of 4 unique records per suite. In this particular example, there are actually 5 unique records per suite.

Figure: Example of three suites selected based on user selection of a minimum of 4 unique records per suite.

Copyright © 2022 Earthquake Solutions