Engineering ground motion record selection in the ITalian ACcelerometric Archive

This paper introduces REXELite, an internet version of REXEL, a software for automatic selection of ground motion suites for nonlinear dynamic analysis of structures. REXELite was developed with the aim of integrating an advanced earthquake records’ repository, such as the ITalian ACcelerometric Archive (ITACA), with a tool to define seismic input for engineering seismic analysis according to international standards (with priority to Europe). In fact, REXELite allows to define target design spectra according either to Eurocode 8 or to the Italian building code, and to search ITACA for suitable sets of seven records (comprised of one or two horizontal ground motion components) matching such target spectra: on average, in a user-specified period range, and with the desired tolerance. The records in the set also have, individually and according to some criteria, the most similar spectral shape with respect to that of the code. Selection options include magnitude, source-to-site distance, soil conditions and, if desired, linear scaling of records to reduce further record-to-record variability of the selected suite.