# Prediction of the Load-Bearing Behavior of SPSW with Rectangular Opening by RBF Network
## 1 Introduction  
Walls have been utilized in construction not only as a barrier (i.e., basement walls) [1; 2] or infill (i.e., infill masonry walls) [3; 4] but also as a lateral load-bearing system. The steel plate shear wall (SPSW) is considered as a lateral load resisting system which is not only used as a load-bearing system for designing new buildings but also is employed as a retrofitting technique for existing structures. The application of this system compared to reinforced concrete shear wall (RCSW) system has increased in the past few decades, due to some advantages, such as lower weight, cost-effectiveness, and proper performance [5], which make some designing codes to add it as a suitable lateral load-bearing system [6; 7]. SPSW diminished the amount of steel in the construction of new buildings and it is lighter than the RCSW system [8; 9]. Moreover, as a retrofitting technique, SPSW can be easily installed in critical parts of the buildings [10; 11]. Some full-scale studies have been done to evaluate the performance of different types of structures equipped with SPSWs [12; 13; 14; 15; 16], but more investigations are needed at substructure level for assessment of the exact behavior of SPSWs with different configurations. SPSWs are required to be very thin in thickness, according to the design phase, especially in upper stories. Preparing very thin plates and installing them is not practical and in this situation, a thicker plate with an opening is recommended [17; 18]. Moreover, because of necessary architectural or functional issues, openings and their effects need to be considered in SPSW systems. Although experimental and numerical researches have been done to investigate the lateral load-bearing behavior of the SPSW with different shapes of opening and different areas, more studies are required to investigate this issue's effects [9; 17; 19; 20; 21; 22; 23; 24; 25; 26; 27; 28; 29; 30]. A short description about the previous researches are presented in Table 1. Besides, evaluation of the shear wall behavior with circular opening is done using Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) by [PERSON] and [PERSON] [29], and developing the artificial neural network (ANN) model using experimental SPSW database is conducted by [PERSON] and [PERSON] [5]. The suitable performance of the machine learning procedures in estimation of the structural behavior has been proven [31; 32; 33; 34; 35; 36]. The significant advantages of these methods, such as high accuracy, less time-consuming, and also no need for expertise in special software and codes, lead to the transformation from traditional finite element method (FEM) or expensive experimental tests to utilizing machine learning for prediction of the behavior of the substructures. It can be predicted that in near future machine learning methods substitute traditional equation methods for designing buildings. Although, ANN has some disadvantages that limit its application in some areas of structural engineering. One of the main disadvantages of ANN is that the accuracy of the network depends on the number of the samples, also it takes a long time to find out the best architecture and network parameters [37; 38]. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the effects of the rectangular openings on lateral behavior of SPSWs using teh radial basis function (RBF) approach. Finite element models are developed and verified by experimental results. The thickness of the steel plate and area of the opening is changed to develop rich numerical data. Changes in load-bearing capacity, stiffness, and energy absorption are also determined by changing the area of the opening. RBF is an efficient computational method is proposed to estimate the load-bearing capacity, stiffness, and energy dissipation of the SPSW. Using a neural network, one can estimate the behavior of an SPSW with a rectangular opening and determine the parameters affecting the wall's behavior.