## 1 Introduction  
In recent years, studies on the resilience-based seismic design of next-generation cities have attracted much attention in earthquake engineering [1; 2; 3; 4]. To achieve a seismically resilient city, it is essential to improve the seismic resilience of important buildings that can highly affect the normal operation of the city, such as the government buildings, hospitals and telecommunications buildings, which are usually constructed using reinforced concrete (RC) tall structure. For RC tall buildings located in high seismic regions, it is difficult to achieve a seismic resilient structure through traditional seismic design [5]. It is well acknowledged that the seismic isolation technology can significantly reduce or even eliminate the damage of structural and nonstructural components [6; 7; 8; 9; 10; 11; 12; 13; 14; 15; 16], thus enabling the buildings to achieve a resilient performance after an earthquake. Hence, the seismic isolation technology is considered an effective and important method to realize resilient RC tall buildings located in high seismic regions. The seismic design of one type of typical seismically isolated RC tall buildings, namely, the RC frame-core tube tall building, is studied here. In comparison with the seismic design of seismically isolated multi-story buildings, it is somewhat difficult to design seismically isolated tall buildings, which satisfy all the requirements specified in the Chinese Code for seismic design of buildings (GB50011-2010) [17], including the efficiency of isolation system, the maximum bearing displacement (MBD) and the maximum tensile and compressive stresses of isolators. This is due to the characteristics of the RC frame-core tall buildings, including long fundamental period, large weight and significant overturning effect [7; 9; 18]. Various problems may be encountered during the design of such isolated tall building, especially in the design of the isolation system. Specifically, some of the main problems are as follows: (1) Numerous parameters are required to be determined. The selection of the isolators, including the number, size and type (which includes the lead rubber bearing (LRB) and the natural rubber bearing (NRB)) of the isolators, are extremely complicated. In addition, nonlinear fluid viscous dampers (NFVDs) may be required to control the large MBD, which is usually observed in the isolation system. (2) Design experience and comprehensive investigations on such buildings are less reported than those on the multi-story buildings. It is worth mentioning here that a step-by-step iterative design method based on a refined finite element (FE) model is usually adopted for such buildings, leading to an overwhelming workload to create such model and implement the time history analysis [9]. The traditional design method of the isolated tall buildings is conclusively considered undesirable and inefficient for the RC frame-core tube tall buildings. In light of the issues discussed above, this study aims to (1) identify and propose a rational range of the critical design parameter for the isolation system of the RC frame-core tube buildings, (2) develop a high-efficiency design method based on such range and (3) validate the rationality and reliability of this method. The yield ratio of the isolation system (referred to as the \"yield ratio\" hereafter), \(Q_{y}/W\), is defined as the ratio of the total yield force of the LRBs (\(Q_{y}\)) to the total seismic weight of the structure (\(W\)) [19; 20; 21; 22; 23]. Previous research has indicated that the yield ratio is a critical design parameter, which significantly affects the efficiency of the isolation system and the seismic performance of the entire building [19; 20; 21; 22; 23]. It is also notable that yield ratio is directly related to the quantity of the LRB isolators. Hence, a rational range of yield ratio can be theoretically used to guide the design of an isolation system. Various investigations on the rational value of the yield ratio have been conducted for multi-story buildings.