Advanced analysis refers to any method that captures the strength and stability of a structural system and its individual members in such a way that separate member capacity checks are not required. However, these methods are either too computational intensive, or cannot maintain same degree of accuracy when applied to wide varieties of frame assemblies. A practical advanced analysis, which eliminates these two drawbacks, will be introduced and further applied to seismic design of steel building frames. When practical advanced analysis is applied to seismic design, it can optimize the final design by controlling the failure mechanism and it can eliminate drawbacks of the traditional LRFD K-factor approach. Thus, it will be used to address the major design impacts due to the 1997 LRFD seismic provision changes. Overall, due to the influence of expected yield stress in the 97 code revisions, drift is likely to control the design even for the concentrically braced frames. In summary, the advanced analysis is consistent with LRFD design and provides a system behavior of the design. Therefore, the proposed method provides a practical alternative design procedure for seismic design.

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