Reducing the Cost of Calculations for Incremental Dynamic Analysis of Building Structures Using the Discrete Wavelet Transform Masoud Dadkhah a , Reza Kamgar b , and Heisam Heidarzadeh b a Master of Science Student, Shahrekord University, Shahrekord, Iran; b Department of Civil Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Shahrekord University, Shahrekord, Iran ABSTRACT The method of incremental dynamic analysis (IDA) is one of the most accurate nonlinear seismic analyses. IDA is a time-consuming method and has a high computational cost. Also, an IDA curve should be obtained from the building analysis subjected to a series of earthquakes that should cover all regions of the structural responses. In this paper, the discrete wavelet transform is used to solve these problems. The results showed that the use of the fltered records reduces the computational cost and time about 87.4% and 73%, respectively, while the maximum error is just about 7.6%. ARTICLE HISTORY Received 16 November 2019 Accepted 16 July 2020 KEYWORDS Incremental dynamic analysis; discrete wavelet transform; nonlinear dynamic analysis; opensees; modified Ibarra-Medina-Krawinkler; tall buildings 1. Introduction Incremental dynamic analysis (IDA) is a seismic analysis method with high-precision and high computational volume that is used to evaluate the seismic performance of the structures subjected to earthquakes with different severity (Huang, Ren, and Li 2017; Moradi, Alam, and Asgarian 2014; Zhou et al. 2017). In the method of IDA, a set of earthquakes is selected and applied to the structures. The capacity of the structure can be expressed in terms of different intensities of the earthquake. One of the main advantages of this analysis method is its probabilistic realm based on the performance of the structure. IDA has a high ability that can show the behavior of the structure from the linear state to the yield state. Also, it could depict the instability of structures when they go into the nonlinear region. But, IDA takes a lot of time and energy because of the number of analyses (Han and Chopra 2006; Vamvatsikos and Cornell 2002). This is problematic, especially in high-rise structures (Gholizadeh and Fattahi 2014; Rahgozar et al. 2014, 2015) with many degrees of freedom (Kamgar et al. 2020; Kamgar and Rahgozar 2017, 2019; Kamgar and Saadatpour 2012; Kaveh, Kabir, and Bohlool 2019; Kaveh and Mahjoubi 2019; Mohammadnejad and Haji Kazemi 2017; Mohammadnejad and Kazemi 2018; Tavakoli, Kamgar, and Rahgozar 2018, 2019). Therefore, researchers have always been investi- gating to reduce the required time for IDA. Some of these studies have led to the estimation of the dynamic responses of multi-degrees of freedom of structures based on the dynamic responses of the structure with an equivalent degree of freedom (Dolšek and Fajfar 2005; Han and Chopra 2006; Vamvatsikos and Cornell 2002, 2005, 2006) or simple mathematical methods (Alavi and Rahgozar 2019; Rahgozar, Ahmadi, and Sharifi 2010; Rahgozar and Sharifi 2009). These methods restrict the accuracy of IDA since they use the response of an equivalent single degree of freedom system. In the meantime, some researchers used optimization methods to reduce the computational cost of IDA (Azarbakht and Dolšek 2007, 2010; Cooper, Seiford, and Tone 2007; Iervolino and Cornell 2005; Luco and Bazzurro 2007). It should be noted that several time-integration methods could be used in the numerical solution of dynamics problems (Kamgar and Rahgozar 2016). The accuracy and speed of CONTACT Reza Kamgar Kamgar@eng.sku.ac.ir Department of Civil Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Shahrekord University, Shahrekord, Iran JOURNAL OF EARTHQUAKE ENGINEERING https://doi.org/10.1080/13632469.2020.1798830 © 2020 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC