• Earthquakes and Structures
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• v.8 no.5
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• pp.995-1016
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• 2015

The reliability or the safety index is a measure of how far a structure is from the state of collapse. Also it defined as the probability that a structure will not fail in its lifetime. Having any increase in the reliability index is typically interpreted as increasing in the safety of structures. On the other hand most of researchers acknowledged that one of the most effective means of increasing both the reliability and the safety of structures is to increase the structural redundancy. They also acknowledged that increasing the number of vertical seismic framing will make structural system more reliable and safer against stochastic events such as earthquakes. In this paper the reliability index and the behavior factor of a numbers of three dimensional RC moment resisting frames with the same story area, equal lateral resistant as well as different redundancy has been evaluated numerically using both deterministic and probabilistic approaches. Study on the reliability index and the behavior factor in the case study models of this research illustrated that the changes of these two factors do not have always the same manner due to the increasing of the structural redundancy. In some cases, structures with larger reliability index have smaller behavior factor. Also assuming the same ultimate lateral resistance of structures which causes an increase to a certain level of redundancy can enhance behavior factor of structures. However any further increase in the redundancy of that certain level might decrease the behavior factor. Furthermore, the results of this study illustrate that concerning any increase in the structural redundancy will make the reliability index of structure to be larger.